Doctor Ryan
by Jaenelle Angelline
Summary: The team gets a new member I stink at summaries. FINISHED. Read the sequel, titled 'Silver Blade', then read the conclusion in 'Vengeance'. Please review. Thanx for all reviews so far!
1. Default Chapter

Disclaimer: I don't own the X-Men. Wish I did. The Ryans are mine, though.

Chapter 1: Doctor Ryan

People were screaming and running in all directions. 

It was terribly distracting, Scott noticed as he aimed his optical beams at another Sentinel. Jean was using telekinesis to slow a Sentinel down so Wolverine could use his adamantium claws on its legs, but the emotional currents were making it hard for her to concentrate. Storm was laying down a cover of fog around the battle scene so that Rogue could sneak in and rip another one's head off its metal shoulders, but the fog was also obscuring the roadway for escaping pedestrians. Scott cursed as a running man blundered out of the fog and crashed into him and caused his optical beam to go wide, pulverizing another section of the crumbling brick building behind the giant robot. "Stay back!" he shouted at the man, who backed away from him with wide eyes. He turned his attention back toward the scene before him, just in time to see a large section of the brick building pull away from its place and begin to fall toward the ground…toward Jean.

"Jean!" he yelled, trying to warn her. He suddenly seemed to be running in slow motion, but the crumbling wall was falling faster than he could move as he threw himself toward his beloved. Jean looked up, her mouth making an O of surprise as the wall fell on her.

He fell to his knees beside the pile of rubble, scraping his knuckles on the rough brick as he tried to dig her out. "Jean," he kept calling, as Wolverine joined him. Both men heard a muttered curse from somewhere in the pile, then a large section of the rubbish simply lifted itself into the air, thanks to Jean's telekinesis, and she scrambled out and sat gasping on the pavement between the two men.

"Are ya okay?" Wolverine said, panting from exertion.

Jean shook her head. The slight motion made her dizzy, and nauseous, and she thought dazedly that she must have a slight concussion. However, of more importance was the fiery pain in her left arm: "I…I think it's broken," she moaned as Scott gently took her wrist and lifted her arm. He looked at the blood that stained her torn sleeve and agreed with her.

"Wrap it up, guys!" he yelled to the others. "We've gotta go home! Jean's hurt!"

"We are done," Storm said quietly from behind him, startling him. He whirled. She stood right behind him, joined by Gambit, Rogue, Iceman, Angel, and Psylocke. They all looked a bit the worse for wear, except Rogue, but since she was nearly invincible, that was to be expected. Jean was the only member of the team that had a serious injury, and Scott cursed himself for his ill-aimed blast as he slipped an arm under her good one and helped her stand.

Jean groaned as she stood and the ground wobbled under her. Storm looked at the bruise across her friend's temple, and said gravely, "We should return home as soon as possible. I believe you have a concussion." 

A sudden commotion in the crowd attracted their attention as a woman wearing a white lab coat elbowed her way through. "Let me through! I'm a doctor! Let me through!"

One man who got her elbow in his ribs grabbed her arm roughly. "Where are you goin', lady?" he said. "You a mutie freak like them? Or a mutie lover?"

She drew herself up to her full height (about five feet four, Wolverine estimated) and huffed, "And if I am, I certainly don't see what business of it is yours! I don't see you offering to help! Have some respect for those who just saved your life!" She spared him a quick glance up and down, and muttered, "Then again, as you plainly have no respect for yourself, I suppose I overestimate your intelligence, asking you to respect someone else!" She yanked her arm out of his grip, ignoring his nonplussed look, and reached the X-Men with no further hindrance. "Put her down," she ordered Scott.

"Ma'am, really, this is not necessary," Scott tried to object. She pinned him with a glare that would have melted his bones if they had been lasers.

"I said, 'put her down'," the woman said. "She shouldn't be moved anywhere with that concussion." Bemused, Scott carefully laid his wife down on the pavement as the doctor knelt beside Jean. "Now, what's her name?"

"Jean," Storm supplied as Scott just stared at her. The doctor looked up from her examination and grinned at Scott. "Not used to being helped like this, huh?" The grin softened a bit as she registered Scott's concern. "She'll be fine," the doctor said kindly to him. To Wolverine, hovering behind her, she snapped, "Will you stop hovering, for gosh sakes? Go rip something up if you're so minded!" She waved a hand at him. Wolverine retreated a short distance but continued to eye her warily. Gambit hid a smile behind his hand at the looks Wolverine was giving the doctor. Few people could order Wolverine around like that; this woman was now on the short list of those who could.

The woman had produced a penlight from the pocket of her lab coat and was shining it into Jean's eye. "Pupils dilated…poor reflex…erratic breathing…" She pushed Jean's hair aside so she could see the bruise, and winced. "Yikes…no wonder…okay…surface laceration, hematoma…hmmm, a little blood…does this hurt?" she applied pressure with her fingers to a portion of Jean's skull just behind the bruise.

"No," Jean replied.

"Okay, then you don't have a skull fracture," she sat back, relieved. "Now brace yourself," and she touched the laceration on Jean's scalp. Jean gasped and squeezed her eyes shut at the burst of sudden pain as the probing fingers brushed the wound. The doctor drew in her breath, once, sharply, then breathed out. And just like that, the lancing pain in Jean's temple went away, leaving behind a throbbing but bearable headache. The woman, who had been crouching beside Jean, seemed to suddenly lose her balance and fell with a bump to her knees. She tried to cover up the movement by reaching for Jean's arm. "Now, how's this feel?" she went on. Jean moaned in reply. The doctor probed gently, feeling where Jean twitched as she felt her way down the redhead's arm. "You've got a fracture here, in the radius. You're okay, it's fixable. If you'll just hold still, then…" and she did the same thing again, that quick breath in and out, and the pain in Jean's arm suddenly went away. Well, most of it, anyway…again, there was a residual ache left.

The woman stood, brushing her knees off, and looked at them. "This seems cliché, I know," she said, "But take two aspirin and give me a call in the morning. Here's my number." She handed Scott a small business card with her name and number on it, turned, and disappeared back into the crowd. Scott looked at the card. Her name was Sara Ryan.

Dr. Sara Ryan climbed the last few steps to her apartment with her teeth gritted against the awful pain. _Why is it, _she thought as she fumbled for her keys and let herself inside,_ that healing my own injuries takes no time at all, but healing others makes me feel like I've run myself through the wringer?_ In the cool darkness of her apartment she slumped against her front door, sitting with her back against it and allowed herself the luxury of a few tears of pain. Then she struggled to her feet and switched on the light. And screamed in shock.

Wolverine leaned against the hall closet door, casually chewing on a toothpick. "Hello darlin'," he drawled.

"What the hell are you doing in my apartment?" Sara snapped at him, her hand on the doorknob, ready to run.

"Checkin' up on ya," he said, pushing off the wall and walking over to her.

"Why?" She snarled at him. "Don't come any closer. I do carry a gun."

"Yeah, I know," Wolverine said, coming to a stop in front of her. "But it's in yer purse, darlin', an' there's no way you're gonna be able to use it with yer arm like that." He poked the toothpick toward her arm.

Sara hid her arm behind her back. "How did you know?" she asked, eyes narrowed.

He approached her again. "The gun, or the arm?"

"Both."

He tapped his nose. "I've got a better sense o' smell than a dog," he informed her. "Smelled the gun in yer purse. As to the arm, I smelled yer blood when ya healed Jeannie. How'd ya do that?" He gently drew her arm from behind her back, looking at the sleeve of her white coat, which was now soaked with her own blood. He reached toward her face, and she flinched from his upraised hand. "Easy, there. I ain't gonna hurt ya." He pushed aside her thick blue-black hair and inspected the cut on her scalp. "Looks a little better now than it did on Jean."

"I heal," she snapped. "So why are you here?" He was silent as she dropped her purse on the end of the sofa and tried to ease her lab coat off her sore arm. When that proved difficult he came up behind her and helped her. She sucked in a breath as the fabric, stuck to her arm by dried blood, came free. Wolverine led her into her small bathroom and turned on the water in the sink, holding her arm under the tap.

"Returnin' a favor," he said, just as she'd given up hope of getting an answer from him. "You helped us. I'm helpin' you." He looked around for a towel. "Where do ya…oh," he said as he turned and was greeted by the sight of a couple of neatly folded towels on top of the toilet back. He picked one up and gently patted her arm dry, looking at the thin layer of skin that had grown over the ugly gash in only two hours. "How long's this gonna take ya to heal?" he asked.

She inspected her arm. "Probably be okay by tomorrow morning," she said. "The bone's already knitting; the skin just has to heal now." She sat quietly for a moment, then said, "Are you hungry? Thirsty?"

He looked at her, and she flushed. "Well, if you're going to help me at least I can show some thanks," she said. "I don't have a lot…I, umm, haven't had time to the grocery store this week yet, but maybe a sandwich or something?"

Wolverine looked at her for a moment. "After a healin' like this, I usually prefer meat," he said. "You should too. Ya need the protein."

Sara bit her lip, thinking frantically. It wasn't that she hadn't had time to go grocery shopping; she simply didn't have the money. Her lawyer had told her he needed more to file more paperwork for her in divorce court, so she had given him what he asked. It hadn't left her much afterward; in fact, without the free lunch at the hospital she worked at, she would be starving right now. She was hungry; right now, very hungry, and she knew what he said was true, but she had no money. "I, uhh, I ate at the hospital I work at," she temporized.

Wolverine knew she was hiding something. He was trying to figure out what when there came a knock at her door. She went to answer it. As soon as the door opened, though, he smelled fear from her. Puzzled, he looked around the bathroom doorframe.

"Get out of here right now or I call the cops!" Sara was trying to close the door on a tall, rather handsome man, dressed in an expensive suit, who had one foot jammed in the door. 

"Sara, come on," the man was saying. "I just want to talk."

"Yeah? Well I don't!" she tried to slam the door again, but he pushed his way in again, this time to stand in her front entranceway. Wolverine had to suppress a growl. There was something he didn't like about this guy and the fact that Sara was scared as hell of him added to his dislike.

He looked around the little efficiency apartment. Wolverine had already seen it contained little furniture: a small bed, a battered dresser with a cracked mirror atop it, several cardboard boxes stacked on their side with books in them, and a small bedside table with a tiny lamp on it beside the couch. There was a small round table with a chair beside it and a refrigerator in the corner. This man in his expensive suit looked completely out of place in here.

"Sara," the man said, his smooth, oily voice grating on the nerves of the unseen listener, "come on. Give up. You'll never get the divorce. Give this up and come home. God, your bathroom at home is the size of this apartment!"

Sara lost her temper. "You want me to come home? Why? So you can bring your 'secretaries' and 'assistants', your 'business associates', home right in front of me? So you can humiliate me, degrade me, and hurt me again? So you can play the perfect married man during the day and beat me up at night? I'm not coming home, Richard. Get out." She brushed past him to go open the door.

He grabbed her arm, the healing one, causing her to cry out in pain. "Listen to me, you--" he dropped her arm and paced in a circle, once, fast, stopping in front of her. "I am not letting you go. You are mine. Understand?"

She pushed away the finger wagging in front of her face. "I. Am. Not. Coming. Home. Is there any part of that you don't understand?" she snapped.

He backhanded her hard and fast across her right cheek with such force she staggered back a step. He followed her, grabbing a handful of her thick black hair and slamming her bodily up against the wall, ignoring her sudden cry of pain as her mending arm was caught between her body and the wall. "Listen to me, Sara. I'm not letting you go--"

"Yeah ya are," came a low, gravelly voice at his elbow. The voice was accompanied by a sharp poke in his ribs. "Let 'er go or I'll shred this expensive suit you're wearin' and give it ta 'er fer a pot scrubber."

Richard Ryan turned, to see a growling, animalistic man standing behind him with three sharp claws puncturing the jacket of his suit. "Are you crazy?" he let Sara go, letting her slide numbly to the floor, and turned to face Wolverine. "Do you know who I am?"

"Criminal attorney, now Senator Richard Ryan. Yeah, I know who ya are. Ya wanna know what else I know?" Wolverine poked him a little harder in the ribs for emphasis. "You're a pathetic little control freak gettin' his kicks outta harassin' and beatin' up on yer wife. But I got news fer ya, dude. Not in front o' me, ya ain't." The man backed out of the apartment at the tip of Wolverine's claws. But as Wolverine slammed the door on him, he called to Sara, "This isn't over yet, bi--" and the slamming of the door cut off the rest of his words.

Wolverine hurried to her, slipping an arm under her good one and helping her to stand. She got to her feet, sniffed once, and wiped her face with the hem of her T-shirt. She went over to the mirror, examining her face, at the purple bruise that was already starting to fade, and sighed. "I'm sorry you saw that," she said quietly.

Wolverine sat on the couch, thinking of many things he wanted to say but decided against. Finally he said, "So that was yer ex-husband, I guess?"

"Yeah," she sighed. The sigh spoke volumes. "At least, he will be my ex whenever my lawyer gets around to completing the paperwork for my divorce. I had to file civilly; with the way I heal, there were never any bruises or signs of abuse for anyone to see, nothing I could report. And with his influence and connections, no one would believe me." She felt her arm. "Look, I don't want to rush you out, but I'm really tired--"

"I'm goin'." Wolverine stood. She escorted him to the door and he was about to step out when she spoke. 

"You know, I don't even know your name. I think the news people call you Wolverine, but I can't see your friends calling you that."

He turned back to her. "Logan. My name's Logan."


	2. Chapter 2

Chapter 2

Jean yawned as she got a cup out of the cupboard and poured a cup of hot coffee. She approached the kitchen table, where Wolverine and Xavier were deep in conversation, and asked, "Is this private, or can I jump in?"

"Please do, Jean," Xavier scooted his hoverchair over and Wolverine pulled out a chair for her. "How do you feel?"

Jean smiled. "Wonderful. Better than I have in a while."

"It came at a price," Wolverine said. "I followed her home last night. She was in pain."

Jean sat with her mouth open as Wolverine recounted his experiences of the evening before. She belatedly realized her mouth was open and closed it. "That's what she does?" she blinked. "She heals people?"

"Yeah, she's a doctor," Wolverine said. Jean laughed.

Xavier laughed with them, then said, "I would like to meet her. Jean could you perhaps tell her that you're still having problems and get her to come here?"

Jean placed her cup in the sink. "I'll try," she said, and headed upstairs to call Dr. Ryan.

Sara drove her old Chevy up the drive to the mansion, staring at the place. It was so big! The sign outside the gate said 'The Xavier Institute for Higher Learning.'

_Higher compared to what?_ She mused as she took in the grandeur of the place. _God, this would make Richard green with envy!_ She composed herself as she went up the front steps, and rang the bell. She expected a butler would answer the door; Richard would have hired one for a place like this. So she was surprised to see the door opened by a tall, handsome young man who she recognized from CNN as Cyclops; the same young man who had been so concerned about Jean. "Umm, I'm here to see Jean?…" she trailed off as Cyclops nodded. 

"Come this way," he said. As Sara followed him, he said, "She's still got a bad headache. She did what you said, took a couple aspirin and went to bed, but woke up still with the headache." They were walking through the mansion as he spoke, and Sara was well and truly lost by the time they took the last turn and stopped before a heavy wooden door. There was a low murmur of voices inside that stopped as Cyclops tapped on the door, and he opened it at a whispered mental command that Sara didn't quite catch. When it opened she saw a kindly looking older man sitting behind the desk, and her patient sitting in a chair in front of it, holding a cup of coffee and evidently not feeling bad at all. A part of her wanted to be upset; she could have been at the hospital helping others, but the other part of her wanted to know why they had wanted her to come here.

"Well," she said mildly, "that headache went away fairly quickly. Please let me know what aspirin you took to rid yourself of that headache; I might start giving that to my patients at the hospital." Jean looked at her a bit guiltily, but the older man sitting behind the desk chuckled.

"Please don't be angry with Jean. She was simply following my orders," he said. Sara looked him over and decided that she could forgive him for messing about with her day. He smiled, and a chair up against the wall moved itself over before the desk, and he indicated she should sit. She did so, noting that for all its elegance, it was still comfortable.

"So who are you, that the X-Men take orders from you?" she said bluntly. Cyclops bristled at her tone as he pulled up a chair himself, but the older man simply looked at him once and he quieted. Sara was impressed. This man commanded a lot of respect from those around him. Although, she mused as she took in the tasteful but expensive décor of this office, that could very well be because this man obviously had money, and a lot of it as well. That much could buy you just about anything.

Xavier watched her as she looked around his office. The way she spoke indicated that she was used to dealing with people with money, and also that she wasn't going to be easily cowed or impressed by an ostentatious display of wealth. That pleased him.

"My name is Charles Xavier," he said to her, and watched her eyes widen.

"You wrote that book, then," she said, "That one, oh, I can't remember the title now--"

"_The Causes of Evolutionary Leaps as Related to Mutants,_ yes," Xavier said, "with Dr. MacTaggert. She's a personal friend of mine, as well as occasional doctor to the team, when their injuries require it."

Sara sat back. "I had wondered," she said. "I always found it difficult to understand why, with all the doctors around the city, whenever the X-Men get hurt in battle, no one ever offers to help, yet your people seem to be up and at 'em when you're needed again."

The door to the office opened again, and Sara blinked as a massive blue furred form came in. He moved with easy grace despite his size, but she got the sense there that for all that mass, he could move faster than she could if an emergency arose. She blinked again as he looked at her, then at Xavier. "Oh, excuse me Professor," said the man, "I did not know you had company. Excuse me, Ma'am," and he was about to leave when Xavier told him, "Hank, please meet our guest, Dr. Sara Ryan."

He looked at her over his glasses, and took her proffered hand, which was dwarfed by his. "You assisted Jean yesterday. Thank you very much; I fear that without your intervention she would still be in our infirmary with an extremely sore arm."

Sara blushed at the thanks. "It was nothing," she waved it off. "Um, I don't wish to cut this short, but I do have a duty shift at the hospital to start in about an hour."

Xavier shook his head. "I'm sorry, I did not know you had somewhere else to be. I wished to speak to you, but perhaps it could wait for another time." He reached down and Sara gasped audibly as she saw him push his wheelchair around the desk for the first time. She hadn't seen the wheelchair behind the massive desk. 

Xavier looked up, and saw her face. He gave a small smile. "I had an accident many years ago. My spine was crushed."

"You're a paraplegic?" Sara asked. He nodded. She said hesitantly, "May I?" Xavier nodded, and leaned forward in the chair obligingly. Sara put her hand on his back, just above the scar, and probed gently with the special ability she privately called her 'Sense'. It showed her the bone fragments, the nerve damage, and yet, she could Sense how it was all supposed to fit together, and how it could fit together again. But she didn't know if she had enough power to put the pieces back together, and she didn't even want to think about what it would cost her.

"Thank you, " she said quietly, removing her hand. Xavier sat back. 

""Do you think you could…" Hank began, but Jean hushed him. From what Wolverine had told her and the Professor, trying to heal the Professor would come at great personal cost to her, and Jean knew Charles wouldn't want that on his conscience.

"It would take a lot of effort," Sara said slowly, thinking about the possibilities. "The thing with my ability is, I can see what needs doing. If I am injured, it doesn't require any conscious effort at all to heal myself. But if I'm trying to heal others, somehow my power transfers the injury from the other person to my own body. Once it's my own injury, I have to concentrate on fixing it consciously. I've never been able to figure out why it works that way; it just does. And I don't worry about it much; I'm usually just glad that I have the opportunity to help others." She smiled then. "That's why I work in the emergency room. The other day I got a little boy who had accidentally cut his hand with a kitchen knife. I transferred some of the wound from his hand to my own, so by the time he got out of the emergency room the number of stitches his hand required had gone from fourteen to just five. The stitches will be gone before he starts school, so he won't have to miss classes or work because he can't use the hand." She rubbed her palm as she spoke, and Jean saw the faint tracery of a red line across the middle of it.

A cell phone rang suddenly, causing everyone to jump. Sara scrambled around in her purse and found hers. "Dr. Ryan," she answered. "What? Oh, no. Where's Dr. Canady? He's not? What about Dr. Church?… Sela, slow down… Okay, I'll be there as soon as possible. Keep him still, and keep trying to page Dr. LeRoux! Have the anesthesiologist meet me there!" She was already in motion as she closed her cell phone, and stopped. "I'm sorry, there's an emergency, I have to go…uh, I don't know how to get out of here…"

"This way," and Jean jumped up, leading her out the door and down the halls. In only a short time they were outside, and Sara was getting into her Chevy. She turned the key in the ignition. The engine sputtered, and died. She cursed, and tried again. "No!" she screamed in frustration, pounding on the steering wheel. "Not now! Come on!" And she tried again, with the same result. She looked up at Jean, standing at the top of the steps, and called frantically, "What's the number of the nearest cab company?"

"Don't bother, darlin'," said a gravelly voice in her ear, and she turned, to see Logan holding out a helmet to her. He already had his on, and the motorcycle was already on. "Come on. I'll give ya a ride." Sara pulled the helmet on, tucking her hair messily under it, and mounted the back of the bike, wrapping her arms around his waist. Then they were off.

Sara hadn't been on a bike in a while, and she had forgotten how fast the scenery could really speed by when one was in a hurry. She tried to concentrate on the emergency she was going to have to treat, rather than the hot metal under her and the distractingly hard body in front of her. In no time at all, they were in front of the hospital, and she yanked off the helmet, handing it to her driver. "Thanks," she gasped breathlessly.

"When do you get off?" He called as she dashed toward the building.

"Six!" she yelled.

"I'll be here!" he responded, but she barely heard him as she rushed down to the ER.

It was a horrible day. Sara rushed from emergency to emergency, intervening where she could, when she felt it wouldn't be noticed by the other doctors, the patient or drain herself too much. There was a broken leg from a fall from a horse. A police officer, shot in a firefight between two gangs, and some of the gang members themselves. She took her time about those, even though their pain gnawed at her. They were in a gang, and when she examined them she saw needle tracks in their arms. She deliberately did not intervene with them; the longer they were in the hospital the longer they'd be without their fix, and maybe it would be enough time for the drugs to completely leave their system. Such a waste, she thought.

She didn't even notice the passing of time until Dr. Greene came in to take the night shift and she realized it was nearly eleven. She figured that her two-wheeled cab would be long gone by now, and she stood in the parking lot indecisively, wondering whether to call a cab, or walk. An inspection of her purse revealed that her wallet was completely empty, and she groaned at the thought of walking all the way home. Nevertheless, she set off across the lot tiredly. Perhaps because she was so tired she missed seeing the motorcycle parked by the staff entrance and the helmeted figure waiting for her.

Wolverine sniffed the air as the wind shifted. It was an automatic thing, something he did without thinking, but it brought to him the scent of the weary woman trudging across the road smelling of disinfectant and Betadine. He revved up the motor and spun in a circle, coming to a stop in front of her. "Need a lift?" he joked, handing her the spare helmet.

Despite her tiredness, she smiled a little. "Sure, handsome," she chuckled, tucking her blue-black hair up into the helmet. "Where are you headed?"

"Where would ya like ta go?"

"Somewhere really far away from here," she muttered to herself, and as the motorcycle started she said in alarm, "No, I didn't mean that. Could you drop me off at my place? Tomorrow's my day off, and I promise I'll make arrangements to have my car towed from your driveway. I'm terribly sorry for leaving it there."

Wolverine pretended he didn't hear her as he zipped down the road. With the wind roaring in her ears, she couldn't speak loud enough to be heard over it, so she settled in for a ride on the back of his bike. His back was warm under her cheek, his muscled middle firm under her hands, and though she would have sworn it was impossible, she soon found herself drowsing under the spell of moonlight, motor, and man.

They pulled up in front of the mansion, and Wolverine turned, about to tell her they were home, but the words died on his lips as he saw the closed eyes. He gently scooped her off the back of the motorcycle, her slight weight no burden to him, and went in. It was thankfully quiet, being now nearly midnight, and Storm was waiting for him, yawning. "Charles said to put her up in one of the spare bedrooms in the east wing," she said. "And Scott said he should have her car fixed by tomorrow afternoon. He has been working on her Chevelle all day." Her eyes twinkled. They all knew about Scott's fascination for old vehicles, and Sara's car was pure heaven to him. Wolverine thanked her with a nod, and carried Sara up to the spare bedroom. She murmured something unintelligible as he laid her down on the bed, but didn't wake as he removed her shoes and tucked the covers up around her, turning off the lights as he left.

Sara blinked at the bright sunlight flooded the room, golden light lying in a bright parallelogram across her bed. She groggily wondered where she was, staring up at the pale blue ceiling, at dancing sparkles of light that looked like water. She got to her feet and looked out the window. There was a huge pool out there, and from her third-floor window she could vaguely see people playing in it. Her mind backtracked fuzzily, and she realized Logan must have brought her back to Xavier's mansion. She quickly scrambled into her shoes and went out. She went down the corridor a way before seeing a flight of steps going down. There was a landing below at what she assumed was the second floor, then another flight presumably going to the first floor. She went down both flights and was standing uncertainly at the foot of the steps wondering where to go next, when a door opened at the end of that hall and Xavier himself came through. Sara blinked. He wasn't in the wheelchair she'd seen him yesterday; in fact, she couldn't classify it as a wheelchair at all! It hovered in the air about a foot off the ground, and she heard the near-inaudible whine of what sounded like a lift. She couldn't even begin to imagine how it worked, and she stood there gaping like a dumbstruck schoolgirl, before she remembered her manners and managed a startled, "Hello."

Xavier realized what she was staring at, and smiled slightly. "It was a gift to me…from someone who lives very far away," he said. She swallowed and blinked twice, getting back her usual demeanor after that.

"Thank you very much for allowing me to stay last night," she said, falling into step beside him as he turned down the hall.

"There wasn't much else we could do," he said lightly. "You were asleep before Logan brought you to the door."

Sara blushed. "I'm sorry--" she began.

Xavier waved a dismissive hand. "Don't be. We often have unexpected guests here, so we always have a spare room ready. It is nearly noon, and I don't believe there is much left from breakfast, but you're welcome to anything we might have in the refrigerator that suits you." He showed her into a large, spacious kitchen, and went himself to the refrigerator and got out the sliced roast beef Storm had recommended to him the day previous. She watched as he made a sandwich, hungry, but unwilling to intrude. When he gestured to the lunchmeat, however, she didn't hesitate any longer, but made herself a sandwich like his. They sat at the kitchen table, eating, Xavier talking about the X-Men.

They were nearly done with their quick meal when Gambit, Cyclops, Wolverine, and Warren came in, covered in motor oil and grease and smelling strongly of hot metal and sweat. Sara's jaw dropped at the sight of the four men, stripped to the waist, muscles rippling. She had to swallow the lump of bread in her mouth hard, twice, to keep from choking. Xavier looked at her with thinly disguised amusement, sensing her appreciation for four fine looking men. Jean, Rogue, and Betsy chose to make their appearance through the back door at just that moment, wearing the skimpiest of bathing suits and dripping from the pool, and Sara looked enviously at their toned physiques and made a firm resolution to pick up on her exercise at the gym. Her eyes strayed back to the men, and she nearly groaned. 

**Spectacular, aren't they?** Jean spoke to her. Sara looked at her and saw her smiling. **Scott's my husband, though, so don't look at him too hard or he'll get self-conscious. **Sara blinked as Gambit turned away from the sink where he'd just washed his hands, and bent in a low bow over her hand. "Good afternoon, p'tite," he said, his French patois evident in his voice. "Gambit jus' finish fixin' your car. Hope you enjoy it."

"Well, he had some help," Scott said, drying his hands on the towel Jean offered him. "Dr. Ryan, I hope you didn't mind, but we took the liberty of fixing your car ourselves. It's not often I get to tinker around with a true classic like yours." 

"Please, call me Sara. And no, I don't mind. I'd do it myself if I had the time." This time Sara's smile was warm, and devoid of the sensual pleasure she had felt earlier. This time it was one true car buff to another. She loved her 71 Chevelle; it was the one thing she hung onto when she'd left her husband. He could have everything else, but she wanted her metal baby. "She's painted in Shadow blue, so I named her Shadow. She's the one thing I hung on to when I left my husband. His lawyer told him she's not worth much, anyway; I think that's why he let me have her. He'd freak if I took his Mustang, or his Jag. Not that I'd want them, anyway." She made a dismissive clucking noise. "Although I do regret him keeping my Buell. I loved my bike."

Wolverine looked particularly interested in that, and the next several minutes were spent talking about bikes in general and theirs in particular. The others quietly slipped out, leaving Xavier, Sara, and Wolverine together. Xavier listened to the conversation for some time, assessing the young woman sitting before him. Her healing skills, while limited, would be a definite asset to the team, her willingness to help others fit in with their goals, and her cheerful personality made him smile. She was a wonderful woman, someone Xavier would have liked had his heart not already been claimed by another. She seemed to be getting along with Wolverine well, too. He was startled out of his reverie as she climbed to her feet, quietly insisting that she had to go.

"Stay," he said impulsively, and she looked at him, startled. "I mean it. Sara, I would like you to join the X-Men. Your presence would be welcome, and your skills would definitely be an asset."

She stood there, mouth opening and closing like a fish before she remembered how to speak. "Uh. I.I don't know what to say, I…I can't fight, I've no skills for that… um." She ran out of words.

"I don't expect an answer right away," he said. "But please consider it."

Sara pondered that all the way home.


	3. Chapter 3

Chapter 3

She continued to think about it as she showered and got into bed that night. Her apartment seemed cramped and crowded after the airy spaciousness of the mansion, and she caught herself thinking about what it would be like to live there. It would be closer to the hospital; and as soon as her divorce went through she would be able to go to part time ER surgeon. That would leave her with more time to devote to the X-Men, and she was certain she could learn to fight as they did. And all night a figure in yellow and black with a low, gravelly voice kept intruding on her dreams. She woke with the covers tangled around her legs.

That day at the hospital wasn't as hectic as the day before had been, and she went home that evening thinking about calling one of the off duty nurses at the hospital and asking her if she wanted to go hang out. The moment she stepped in, though, she saw Wolverine stretched out on her couch, apparently asleep. She giggled quietly to herself and carried her groceries into the kitchen, suddenly glad she'd splurged on a couple of good steaks. At least she'd have something decent to offer him. She hummed as she marinated them in an Italian herb marinade and opened a pack of frozen vegetables to steam.

Wolverine wasn't asleep, of course. He'd pretended to so he could see what her reaction would be. She hadn't exploded at him. That was a good sign. He heard her humming quietly in the kitchen, and he figured he wasn't going to be kicked out. And he smelled steak, which made his mouth water. That was an even better sign. Then she disappeared into the bathroom, and he heard water running as she took a quick shower. She came out smelling of lavender soap and strawberry shampoo, wrapped in a shapeless, comfortable bathrobe, and chose a pair of jeans and a T-shirt from a drawer, disappearing with them in the bathroom. Seconds later, she came out, fully dressed, just in time to take the vegetables from the stovetop. She plugged in a tiny electric grill on her countertop and put the steaks on. Then she came over to the couch and scooped her mail from the table, looking through it. He opened one eye as she cursed suddenly. Her mood changed faster than he could sit up. He watched as she ripped open an envelope, scanned the letter in it, and turned to him. "Can you stay here and finish cooking?" she asked. "I have to run downtown to my lawyer's office."

"Sure, darlin'," he said. "Anythin' wrong?"

She didn't answer, but grabbed her purse. Moments later he heard her car start up and roar off.

Hours went by. The steaks were done, the table was set, and still she didn't appear. Wolverine had just about given up when he heard her car pull up. When he didn't hear her coming up, he went out to see what was wrong.

Sara's forehead was leaning on the steering wheel, and she was crying as hard as anyone he'd ever seen. He opened the passenger door and slid into her car, wrapping his arms around her in an attempt to calm her. "Sshh," he whispered, patting her back. She radiated distress, and he wondered what had happened. "Darlin' what happened?" he asked gently.

"I just found out my husband was paying my lawyer not to put my divorce through. I paid all the court fees. I gave him everything he asked me for, all the money he wanted. And he wasn't doing a damn thing!" she wailed. "I just went to him to tell him I wanted my money back. He refused! Told me to bug off, and told me to go back and forget all of this because I'm never going to find a lawyer in this town to handle my divorce." She looked empty, drained. "I can't do this anymore. I've been pulling extra shifts at the hospital to make a little extra just to keep this apartment. There hasn't been a lot left to pay for groceries or car repair. I'm going to have to give up." She opened the door and climbed the stairs up to the apartment, where she began to toss clothes into a battered suitcase.

Wolverine stood there, at a loss for what to do. Her despair made him feel like there was a hole somewhere under his heart. He cared about her; he was surprised to admit that after only three days of knowing her, but it was true. And he had seen for himself that her husband was an abusive idiot. He didn't deserve her, and she didn't deserve to be treated like this. "Sara," he said slowly as an idea began to form. "Don't do anythin' yet, okay? I'll be back tonight, I promise." He left, jumping on his motorcycle, and sped off back to the mansion.

Xavier was sitting up in bed reading when there came a knock on his door. He was surprised when the door opened and he saw Wolverine standing there, uncomfortable with being there yet plainly desperate. "Uh, Professor, can I talk to ya real quick?"

Charles looked at his bedside clock quickly. Almost midnight. "Logan…" he said, "can this wait? It's rather late."

Wolverine shifted his weight uneasily, and Xavier became alarmed. Wolverine wouldn't be this uneasy if it weren't important. "What is it?" he said.

"It's Sara," Logan burst out. "Chuck, remember I told ya her husband abused her and she was in the middle o' a divorce? Well, she found out today her lawyer ain't even filed the papers, and her bastard husband's been payin' her lawyer not to file. He just refused ta give Sara her money back. She's desperate, she's talkin' about goin' back to him, an' yet if she does he's just gonna hurt her again. She's packin' her stuff right now; I told her not ta do anythin' cause I wanted to talk ta ya."

Xavier made a quick decision. "Tell her to come here tomorrow. I'll talk to a couple lawyers I trust and get them to meet her here to sign the papers."

Wolverine smiled, and Xavier knew he'd made the right decision. "I'll tell her. Thanks, Charles," he said, dropping his trademark irreverence for a moment to thank his mentor. Then he was gone, hurrying off to tell Sara the news, and Xavier was left wondering how things between the two had progressed to such a point so quickly.

The door was locked when Wolverine got there, and her car wasn't in the parking lot. He picked the lock quickly, familiar with the procedure, and found a note, hastily scribbled, and left on the battered kitchen table.

Logan:

I'm sorry. I know what you're going to do. You're going to go and ask Professor 

Xavier to find a lawyer to handle the divorce. As much as I'd like to be rid of the sleazebag 

I married two years ago, I just have to face it, it's not going to happen. Richard is just too

powerful, and I can't fight him anymore. I've been trying for three years to get him out 

of my life, and I just have to accept that it's not going to happen. I'm sorry, dearling. I'll 

stop by the mansion sometime in the next couple of days to talk.

I love you,

Sara.

Wolverine tore through the apartment, trying to find something with her cell number on it, or Richard's address, but found nothing. Anguished, he ran back out, jumped on his bike, and rode home as fast as he could.

Over the next few days he tried desperately to reach her. He waited at the hospital for her to come; her coworkers hadn't seen her. He called the number on the card she'd given Jean; the first few days there was no answer, and the third day a message said the number had been disconnected. He tried to track down her husband, but the secretary kept putting him off.

Xavier was very disappointed when Wolverine came back without Sara, but not overly concerned. As the days went by and Wolverine became more and more frantic, he started to get worried. Two weeks went by without hearing from Sara. All the X-Men were worried now, and they kept an eye out for her. So Jean and Betsy were electrified one afternoon when they saw her with Senator Richard Ryan in the local mall, buying a fancy cocktail dress. Jean rushed over. "Sara! Where have you been? We haven't heard from you in ages!" 

Sara turned to look at them and Jean was alarmed. Sara had gotten so pale, her violet eyes were huge in her thin face, and there was a haunted air about her. Her eyes were full of fear as Ryan interposed himself between her and them. "Now, Sara, dear," he said, his grip tightening on her thin wrist so hard Jean swore she heard the bones crack, "You're tired from all the shopping. Say goodbye to your friends, we're going home. She's been sick," he said to the two women smoothly. "We'll be going now." Sara took one last desperate look behind her, and he noticed. He gave her such a hard shove she stumbled, and was only saved from falling by the death grip he had on her arm. She stumbled out to the parking lot and Jean and Betsy watched as he practically shoved her into a black Lincoln with tinted windows. The car peeled out of the parking lot so fast it almost swiped another car coming in.

Xavier looked troubled when they told him about the incident. Wolverine paced furiously around the office, muttering to himself and sliding his claws in and out. "Wolverine," Xavier finally said, "stop doing that, I can't think!" He turned to the two women. "She was buying an evening dress?" he asked. "That would be the Governor's Ball tomorrow night, then. I had considered not going, but I think that might be the best time to face him and ask him what he has been doing to Sara. The invitation said I could bring an escort, so Jean, if you would accompany me, I would appreciate it. Please ask Scott if he would consider driving and Wolverine, if you would remain in the car, I could call on you should something happen."

Wolverine agreed. Normally he hated being dragged out to these functions, but as long as he was going to be in the car, it would be all right. And he would do anything just to see Sara again. Jean's description of her current condition was driving him insane.

Scott agreed to act as chauffeur and bodyguard, so at six the next afternoon the limo carrying Xavier, Jean, and Wolverine pulled up in front of the governor's mansion with Scott at the wheel. Jean alighted, Scott got the regular wheelchair out of the back, and together they got Xavier out of the back and into it. He drove off to park and Jean and Charles went inside.

They spotted Senator Ryan immediately. His tall six foot five frame was easily distinguishable among the other dignitaries, and at his side, close by, was their friend. She looked beautiful, but too thin for health, as Jean's practiced eye pierced the layers of cloth on the dress she wore to the body underneath. And she moved stiffly, as though she was in pain and trying to hide it. Her smile was artificial, and didn't touch her eyes, and her body language spoke eloquently of the fear she had for the man beside her. In contrast, the Senator was relaxed, gracious, and ebullient, laughing a great deal and gesturing expansively. Jean itched to go over there and talk to Sarah, but pleasantries had to be exchanged, introductions made, and time spent in small talk. Xavier restrained himself and worked his way over to the Senator and his wife in due time.

"Senator, hello," he said graciously, taking the man's hand. It lay for a moment, like a limp fish, before the Senator dropped it. "And this is your wife, I take it? It's lovely to meet you, Mrs. Ryan." He held out a hand, and she took it. He probed her as he shook her hand. Fear. Pain. A feeling of being trapped. A desperate longing to know how Wolverine was doing. And despair. Xavier felt her hopelessness, and he smiled warmly as he gripped her hand in a firm squeeze.

Jean murmured the expected pleasantries to the Senator as she stood there longing to rip him apart. She could feel Sara's despair even through her shields. He picked up on something in her manner, though, and leaned in closer, looking at her. "You're the one who stopped us in the store day before yesterday," he breathed. He spun away from Jean and took Sara's arm in a grip that bruised her skin. "If you will excuse us," he said to the various dignitaries around him. "Sara, come with me." Puzzled looks followed the couple as he spoke a quick word to the governor, who nodded and indicated a door just off the main ballroom. Senator Ryan started off toward the door, dragging Sara with him. The door closed, and the others turned back to their business. Xavier and Jean continued to make the rounds, but with one eye on that door. Jean was shielded, so she didn't feel what was happening until a scream of pain and terror turned all heads in the ballroom to that door. Jean was in motion almost immediately, pushing Xavier's wheelchair over to the door. The other guests crowded in and gasped in shock.

Sara lay on the floor in a heap, sobbing. Her dress was torn, and they saw the rope burns on her thin throat that the high-necked dress was hiding. The torn skirt exposed a length of pale thigh, her stockings were ripped and showing a number of painful red welts on the skin. There were rope burns on her thin wrists and ankles, bruises on her back, throat, and arms, and her hair, thrown back from her forehead, now showed a bloody laceration from the heavy rings her husband wore on the hand he had backhanded her with. Senator Ryan was so far gone in his rage that he struck her several more times as she sobbed and begged him to stop before he became aware that he had an audience. Governor Fletcher stalked into the room and grabbed his fist before it could strike her again. "Richard!" he thundered. Jean responded to Xavier's telepathic command and slipped past the other guests, going to Sara and wrapping her dinner jacket around her. Meanwhile Fletcher continued to speak.

"I heard rumors, but I didn't believe them," he snapped at the Senator. Ryan's face had gone pasty white. He knew his career was over now. The press that attended such events was snapping pictures of the woman lying on the floor bleeding and bruised from his fists. It would be all over the headlines the next day.

"Jim," he laughed shakily, "look, you know me. I just lost my temper, see? There's no harm done." He held a hand down to Sara, which she shrank away from.

"No harm done!" Fletcher thundered. "My God, man, I'll see to it that you go to prison for this! Look at your wife! What have you done to her? You sadistic bastard, you'll never complete your term! I'll see to that!" He pushed Ryan's hand away from him, wiping his hand on his leg as if to wipe away clinging filth, and turned away.

Ryan did what none of them expected him to do. He went berserk.

Jean wasn't prepared when Ryan snatched Sara away from her. His eyes were crazed as he shrieked, "You bitch! You've ruined me!" From out of nowhere came the flash of a knife, and a gasp of surprise and pain as Sara collapsed. Blood began to pool under her.

"Sara!" Jean screamed, catching the other woman as she fell. Fletcher whirled and grabbed Ryan firmly, wrenching the knife from him, and bellowed, "Police!" Several officers were present, and two officers came forward, cuffing and leading the Senator away. Scott appeared at Jean's side, lifting Sara in his arms. Fletcher came forward. "The ambulance is on its way," he said.

"There's no time," Xavier said tersely. "Jim, do you trust me?"

"Yes." The man said with no hesitation.

"Good. Then I'll call you when we get her help and let you know how she is. If she goes to a hospital the press will have a field day with her. I'm going to take her somewhere private."

Jim Fletcher nodded. "All right, Charles. Go."


	4. Chapter 4

Chapter 4

Jean slammed the phone down in exasperation. "If one more newspaper calls here to find out where Sara Ryan is I'm going to disconnect the phone. Can't they leave her alone?" she sighed.

It had been a week since the fiasco at the Governor's Ball. Xavier had brought Sara to the mansion, where she had recovered thanks to Hank's careful attention. She had thanked them all profusely, and accepted their offer of sanctuary (actually Xavier didn't give her a choice; there was no way she could leave anyway, the press were practically camped outside the mansion's gates.) They had had a field day with Richard Ryan. The photographs of Sara taken at the ball had illustrated the lurid stories they'd written about Ryan's treatment of his wife. He was now in prison awaiting trial, and lawyers who had been reluctant to help her before were now calling incessantly to see if they could help her out with a suit, or divorce. Xavier spoke to all of them, telling them thank you, but no, she already had a lawyer. He had asked one of his personal attorneys to file the paperwork, and given the public nature of the case, it had gone through the red tape with unusual speed. The papers were ready to sign whenever Sara was ready.

Of Sara herself they had seen entirely too little. Xavier had told them she wanted to sort out what had happened, and she needed quiet time, so they had left her alone, aside from friendly hellos when they had seen her. She had returned them, but spent much of her time by herself, or in Wolverine's company. Jean had seen the two of them heading off into the woods earlier.

Sara and Logan strolled down the trails, each wrapped in their own thoughts. She was thinking about the legal mess she was going to have to get into; he was thinking how pretty her hair was, dappled with flecks of sunlight that filtered through the trees. She spoke first. "I shouldn't spend so much time moping," she sighed. "They're going to get tired of answering the phone calls."

"Chuck said ta take all the time ya need," Wolverine said. "An' a lot happened. Ya need time ta sort it all out."

"I know," she said. "But I still feel like I shouldn't stretch everyone's patience too far." They walked on for a time in silence. 

Wolverine asked tentatively, "Sara…what happened?"

She was silent for a long time. "He was furious," she said finally. "And he was so pleased with having 'won' as he put it. He said he would teach me a lesson. I didn't eat, drink or sleep for days. I gave in. I promised him I would never leave him again. He said he would test me at the Ball, that if I was completely obedient he would allow me to resume work at the hospital." She looked at him with eyes so full of pain he ached for her. "I don't think I need to go into details. You know what he was like." She was silent for a while, and he looked over at her as they came out of the woods and sat on the grass by the lake. She was crying silently, tears falling down her cheeks. He wrapped his arms around her in a hug, and she hugged him back as she sobbed on his shoulder. He let her cry herself out, sitting with his back against the tree, snuggled her between his knees with her back too him, and held her as the sun slowly worked its way down to the western horizon. 

Sara got up, went down to the lake, and splashed some of the cool water on her arms. A mischievous smile crossed her lips and she turned suddenly, sprinkling water in his direction as she laughed. He yelped in surprise and scrambled away from her, then ran after her as she skittered away from him and tackled her. She screamed with laughter as he carried her up onto the lake's dock and dumped her off, but at the last minute she grabbed his ankle and dragged him in after her. They came up, spluttering and gasping, and laughing. It was good to see her laugh again, he thought.

She dragged herself to the shore and sat in the grass, wringing the water out of her long hair. She grabbed handfuls of her shirt and tried to wring it out as Logan stripped his own T-shirt off and squeezed most of the water out. She licked her lips at the sight of his muscled torso as he pretended not to notice her appraising glance. He dropped the pretense as she removed her own shirt, borrowed from Jean, and started to wring it out. She wore a plain white cotton bra that was nearly transparent now because of the water, and the cool breeze brought certain parts of her anatomy into prominence. She had a nice body, he thought, as he looked her up and down approvingly. A little thin, but she was a lovely woman. And the sight of her in tight jeans and a wet bra was doing things to his anatomy as well.

Sara grinned at the subtle shift in his hips as he shifted his weight. His jeans looked suddenly too tight for him. She sneaked up behind him and wrapped her arms around his waist, pressing her bare chest against his back, teasing him. He dropped his shirt, spun, and grabbed her as she giggled in his ear.

The sun set the rest of the way without them.

The X-Men were all surprised when she joined them at the breakfast table the next morning, yawning. They kept their conversation on other topics, choosing to avoid, for the moment, the topic of her divorce. Directly after breakfast she disappeared into Xavier's study with him, and they remained there until nearly lunch. She emerged, looking grim but satisfied, and Xavier addressed them all at lunch. "Sara's signed the papers," he said, "and I faxed them into my attorney's office. Now, Sara has said there are some things she wishes to get from Senator Ryan's house. Logan, Warren, Scott, Jean, I would like you to go with her and help her get whatever she needs to get. The police have informed me that the senator did post bail and is home, so I want you all to be careful, and do whatever you have to do to ensure her safety." Sara looked about ready to protest at his show of caution, but he raised a hand. "Sara, don't argue." She subsided.

Ryan was indeed home. He opened the door as she rang the bell, and grabbed her arm as she walked in. "There's nothing here that's yours--" He started to hiss. He was stopped by the sight of three large men glowering at him, and looking quite ready to commit murder if he gave them a chance. He dropped her arm with a curse and backed away, looking sourly as Sara went to a desk by the large living room window and took a sheaf of papers from a drawer. She folded them, tucked them in her purse, and went up the stairs to her room, the guys following. The room was huge, ostentatiously furnished, and it was evident that very little of it was her doing. There were things in the room so at odds with her personality Jean knew Ryan had decorated the room, not Sara. There was very little in here that was Sara. 

She had a couple of plastic bags in her purse, and she proceeded to open her drawers, selecting some clothing here, some there, and putting them in the bags. Most things she left in the drawers, explaining to them, "I don't want them. Half the clothes in here are things he picked out for me." She turned and went back out to the hall, and into another door. Ryan yelled. "There's nothing in there that's yours!" he howled. "Get out of my bedroom!" She ignored him, walking in, and he made a move to stop her. Wolverine stopped him, looking dangerous, and Ryan watched in impotent fury as they followed her in. She ignored everything in there, going instead to a door in the far wall, which had a heavy lock on it. She tried it, and found it locked. She turned to Richard. "Open it." 

"No."

"Do as she says," Logan growled. He looked meaningfully down at his fist as his claws started to slowly protrude from his knuckles. Ryan paled, and pulled a key from his pocket, flinging it to the floor at her feet. She picked it up, turned the key in the lock, and opened the door. Jean flinched at what she saw inside.

A bed frame, with a threadbare, stained mattress on it; rope hung around the posts, and from hooks in the ceiling. Right above the bed, in the ceiling, was a hook with two keys on it. Sara climbed on the bed and tried to reach them, her face pale. Scott stepped onto the bed wordlessly and got them for her. She said flatly, "They're the keys to my Buell and my Chevelle. He taunted me with them while he had me here." She went to the wall where there was a large chest pushed against it, and opened it. Warren gasped and Wolverine flinched at the assortment of things hidden in that trunk. More rope, gags, blindfolds, a car battery, numerous leather straps, adult toys, thin bamboo sticks that Jean had seen Storm use to tie her plant trailers to, and two well-worn leather whips that smelled of old blood. Sara stared at them, with an unreadable expression, and reached for a packet shoved in the bottom. Jean knew they were pictures. She didn't need to see what they were; it was evident.

Ryan snatched them from her, angry. "Those are mine!" he hissed at her. "I took them!"

Sara grabbed at the packet, but he refused to let go. "I'm not letting you have them," she said, her voice shaking a bit. "You'll find some way to use them against me!" She grabbed for the packet, and it tore, spraying photos all over the floor. Jean scooped them up, trying not to look at them. They were humiliating photos of Sara, nude, bound, tormented, and degraded. The others gathered up the remainder, and by unspoken agreement, they handed them to Jean, who tucked them into her purse. Sara fled the little cell, and they followed her. She stuffed her two bags in the back of her Chevelle, and tossed the key to the Buell at Logan. He got on the bike and revved it up, and Warren, Scott, and Jean got into Scott's Mustang. They went back to the mansion.

Sara slammed the door of her Chevy and got her clothes out of the back, running up the stairs to her room. She came back down and took the photos from Jean, going straight out the back door. She lit a fire in the grill behind the house, waited for it to really begin burning, and then fed the photos to the flames one by one until they were all gone. She turned and stalked into the house, her face set, and no one said anything to her as she went into her room and locked the door. She didn't come out until dinner. She tried to laugh, and talk with them at dinner, but it was obvious that her heart wasn't in it. Logan followed her to her room afterward.

He lay, staring at the ceiling, listening to the soft, even breathing of the woman sleeping beside him, curled against his ribs. She had no idea how close he had been to killing her husband that day. When he had seen the room that she had lived in during the weeks she'd been gone, he'd seen red. He wanted to rip the bastard senator into pieces for what he'd done to Sara. She was a special, wonderful woman, with so much to give. How could Richard Ryan have missed seeing what he had? How could he have so callously destroyed and discarded the trust and love she had given him? For she did love him; Logan saw it in her eyes, her voice, and her pain. Even after all he'd done to her, she still loved him. She told Logan she wasn't asking for anything in the divorce papers. He could have everything, she said. She would take away from the marriage exactly what she had gone into it with, materially; her car, her beloved bike, and her clothes. Logan knew she'd be taking with her the memory of pain, humiliation, and degradation too. It was an unfair trade. He clenched his fist. She didn't want anything; he thought she deserved more, and said as much. She had given him a very small smile, and said, "I have more. I have you." They had made love again, she with a desperation he hadn't felt in her the day before. A desperation that tore at his heart because she was asking him silently to show her she could be loved. "I love you," he whispered, pulling her closer, stroking the black hair silvered by moonlight.


	5. Chapter 5

Chapter 5

Sara came back from the press conference the next day drained. "Well, that's that," she said wearily, plopping down on the couch in the X-Men's rec room and staring at the TV, where her own image, answering reporters' questions, was replaying on the screen. The X-Men had been watching avidly, especially Wolverine, who had been admiring her grit and determination. She hadn't answered any of the lurid questions they had thrown at her, and had kept her calm even though he could see some of the stupid things they had asked ("Mrs. Ryan! How do you feel knowing that he's likely to lose his Senate seat?") scraped at her nerves and angered her. But she bit her lip, answered them all calmly, and walked away from the press with more admirers than detractors. The political commentators had been as full of praise for her 'delicate handling of a very bad situation' as they were full of condemnation for Senator Ryan. One man even said that he wouldn't have been nearly so kind to the Senator as she had been. 

"Please, can we change the channel?" she asked Warren, who was holding the remote. "I'm sick of hearing people talk about me." He looked at her face and hit the button.

It was little use. Every channel seemed to be airing footage of the conference or talking about it. Sara got up and left the rec room, heading upstairs to her room. On the way up, she ran into Xavier. "Hello," she said.

"Sara," he acknowledged. "I was looking for you. Have you given any more thought to joining the team?"

She nodded. "I'd like to," she said. "I still want to keep my job at the hospital, though. I'm doing some good there and they're very shorthanded on ER surgeons. I was thinking about going back on a part-time basis, and being here helping you guys out the rest of the time. Do you think that would work?"

Xavier smiled broadly. "I was hoping you would agree," he said happily. "Here." He handed her a folded pile of blue cloth.

"What is it?" she asked even as she unfolded it. And she grinned in delight, not waiting for his answer. The large red and black X on the right breast of the suit was answer enough. "Oh, wow," she said. "My own uniform!"

Xavier chuckled heartily. "Feel free to alter it as you wish," he said. "Most of the others do, or they wear what is comfortable for them. Just be sure that whatever you do to it, you'll still be able to move unhindered. Speed and freedom of movement is important." He started to move off down the hall. "I will tell Scott to expect you in the Danger Room tomorrow."

Sara called after him, "Thank you!" and stared at his retreating back, wondering how she could repay him for his kindness.

Wolverine came on her later that evening after dinner sewing in her room. "Whatcha doin'?" he drawled, sitting on the bed beside her. She looked at him, almost glowing with happiness. "Professor Xavier asked me to join the team," she beamed. "And I accepted. He offered me this uniform, and told me to alter it if I wanted to, so that's what I'm doing."

"Yer joinin' the team?" he asked. Something in his tone made her look at him, and she narrowed her eyes. 

"Yes," she answered warily. "You don't sound thrilled."

"I'm not," he snapped, getting up and closing her room door.

"Why not?" she asked, puzzled.

"It's a dangerous business," he told her, "I'd hate ta see ya get hurt, or killed. It's not easy, no matter what it looks like."

"What are you saying?" she said bluntly.

"I'm sayin'," and he got up again, to pace around her room, "that it's dangerous, and ya don't know what yer getting' inta. I don't want ta have ta watch out fer ya in a fight when I should be protectin' myself. I can't be watchin' ya all th' time."

Sara looked at him, her rising anger betrayed by the pink flush in her cheeks. She clenched her hands around the cloth in her lap to stop herself from belting him. "You're implying that I can't take care of myself," she said quietly. 

"Well…" Logan hesitated, then went on, "well, yes. Yer not the real aggressive type, Sara, and this business we're in calls fer a lot o' that. I jus' think maybe ya should reconsider." His next words caused her to lose her temper completely. "Ya can't fight like 'Ro, or Betsy, an' ya don't got offensive powers like Jean's. I jus' think maybe ya'd be better off stayin' here 'stead o' goin' out on missions like we do."

Sara gathered up her things, placing them in her sewing basket, mentally going through things she wanted to say and discarding most of them because they involved a lot of swearwords that she wasn't sure she wanted everyone else to hear. She turned to him, her anger fully roused, and stared him down like a rabbit under a hawk's eye. "Logan." She began, her voice flat. "Get the hell out of my room. What makes you think I can't handle myself? What makes you think I can't fight? _What makes you think you'll have to baby-sit me? Did I say I needed a babysitter? DID I SAY I WANTED YOU TO WATCH OVER ME?_" Sara knew she was shouting, and that everyone could hear her, but she was past caring. "I am perfectly capable of taking care of myself! Just because I didn't choose to fight Richard doesn't mean I can't. Stop assuming I'm some helpless naïve little girl, because I'm not!" She turned away from him, angry, and ran out of the room, crashing straight into Jean, Scott, and Storm. Angry at herself for losing her temper and at a loss for where else to go, she retreated to the garage, where Scott had put her car up on blocks. She seized a wrench and lay on a sled, sliding under the car, disappearing from sight.

Not much longer later she heard the garage door open and footsteps walk in. She groaned inwardly as she saw a pair of men's sneakers walk into the garage and stop. There was silence, then a voice. "Sara."

It wasn't Logan's voice. She slid out from under the car and saw Cyclops standing there. She sighed again and sat up. "Look. I know you guys didn't appreciate hearing me lose my temper, and I'm sorry. He just--" she shook her head.

"Pissed you off," Scott said with a twinkle in his eye. "I know. He does that to a lot of people. We heard."

Sara wiped her hands on a shop towel. "I'm not a helpless little girl," she muttered. "When my dad was stationed in China I took Tai Chi from some monks in a nearby monastery."

Scott crouched next to her, putting a wrench on the floor back into the toolbox. "A great deal of Logan's past is a mystery to him. Several women he loved in the past died. He finds it hard to open up and love anyone. He cares a great deal but tries not to show it because he wants to preserve that macho image. Let me tell you something, though; there's no one I'd rather have in a fight guarding my back than him. It's taken me a long time to say that; I had my reservations about him for a while. He irritates me with this habit he has of slipping out and disappearing for days on end."

Sara looked at him mildly, anger gone. "He irritates you with the way he feels about your wife, too," she said. "Though from what I've seen, you've nothing to worry about on that end. He respects you and her both too much to move in on her. And she loves you, period, end of story."

Scott grinned. "I know. But enough, I came to talk about the two of you. He can be overprotective, but he did have a point. You don't have much experience with fighting."

She wiped her hands on the towel again, scrubbing at some stubborn grease. "The monks taught me swordwork. I wish I had thought to bring mine from Richard's house; at the time I was too upset to think about it."

Scott offered her a hand up. "We have the Danger Room to practice in. And Psylocke—Betsy to us—is quite an accomplished swordswoman herself. Charles keeps a variety of different weapons for us to use. Want to go see if he has an extra sword?"

Sara grabbed his hand. "Could I?"

"Let's go." As they packed up the tools, Scott sent telepathically to his wife, **Jean. Please ask Betsy to join us in the Danger Room.**

**What's up?**

**Sara's been trained in Tai Chi swordwork. She might be a little rusty, and would welcome a sparring partner to work out with. And Betsy's about as good as anyone I know. The Danger Room's not real good at simulations like that, as she constantly tells me.**

Jean's mindvoice was filled with amusement. **I'm talking to Logan. He's trying to convince me to tell the Professor she shouldn't join. Shall I tell him she is, love?**

Scott laughed aloud. **No, Jean, how about we let him find out for himself tomorrow morning at workout? He needs a surprise now and then. Keeps him sharp.**

She laughed too. **All right.** She was silent, and he felt the dim echo of her calling Betsy telepathically, then she spoke to him again. **She's on her way.**

Jean broke off her telepathic exchange and returned her attention to the man in front of her. Logan was pacing angrily around in circles, and Jean thought with amusement that by the time he had done the carpet would need replacing. He was spluttering angrily.

"…but I'm worried she won't be able ta handle herself, though! She's a doctor, with healing powers, nothin' overly aggressive, or defensible. She's liable ta get herself killed out there! Jean, ya gotta tell Chuck she can't join!"

Jean spoke as he stopped to take a breath. "Logan, she's probably seen us on the news. She knows what we do is dangerous; she knows we get hurt, and she probably guesses we occasionally get killed. If she knows all that and she's still willing to join us, I'd say that's her right. She has the right to make her own choices. You don't have the right to infringe on her right to make her own decisions. She wouldn't stand for that. Her husband picked out her clothes, her car, her friends, her work, and probably her room décor! The last thing she will want is to get into another relationship where that is the base. If she so much as thinks you might do that to her she'll turn and run away from you. You don't want that."

Wolverine stopped short as her words penetrated. "I didn' think 'bout that. Ya think that's why she got mad at me, because she thought I was goin' ta control her the way her husband did?"

"I would say that was a very real possibility," Storm said as she swept into the room, carrying a glass of iced tea. "Logan, you must think about her background. Knowing what you do of her recent past with her husband, do you think she would voluntarily place herself in that position again?"

"No," he sat down at the library's reading table. He thought about that for a moment and sighed. "I pissed her off, didn' I?"

"Yes," both women replied emphatically.

"I better go apologize," he said, getting up. Storm caught his arm.

"Why not give her some time to cool off?" she suggested. "The way she looked when she left I do not believe confronting her tonight would be a wise choice. Why not speak to her tomorrow after our practice in the Danger Room?"

Wolverine chewed over that for a moment, then said, "Okay, I see yer point. I'm gonna go up ta bed. Night, 'Ro. Night, Jean." And he was gone.

Jean laughed softly once she knew he was gone. "He's in for a surprise," she said. Storm looked at her quizzically. Jean explained, "Sara was trained in Tai Chi sword work. From what Scott tells me, she's quite good. Want to go see?"

Storm gestured out the door. "Lead the way."

Scott didn't take his eyes off the two women circling each other on the floor of the Danger Room as Storm and Jean joined him at the observation window. Looking down, Jean could see why.

Betsy and Sara circled each other, both holding swords, neither taking eyes off the other. As the three of them watched, they came together, swords clashing. Sara parried, thrust, alternately taking the offensive and defensive against her opponent. Her leggings and exercise top was soaked, but she showed no sign of giving up. Betsy circled her warily again, then attacked, getting past Sara's defense and knocking the young woman to the mat. "That's only the third time she's done that," Scott told the two women as they watched. "Sara might be rusty now, but when she's back up she and Betsy will be able to take down anything…or anyone…together!"

She laughed, and Sara echoed her as she accepted her offer of a hand up off the mat. They gave each other the traditional salute with their swords, then both turned as the door opened and Scott, Jean, and Storm walked in. Jean smiled broadly at Sara. "Logan will definitely be eating crow tomorrow," Betsy said in her clipped British accent. "Very few people can hold out that long against me like that for long. If, as you say, you are out of practice, God help the enemy we take on when you are back in form!"

"Amen to that," came another voice, and they all turned, to see Xavier coming in the door. "However, if any of you wish to be in time for training tomorrow, I do suggest all of you go to bed now. Sara, Logan is asleep, so you shouldn't see him till tomorrow." His eyes twinkled. "Then I believe he'll have plenty of apologizing to do."

And so it proved. When the X-Men gathered in the Danger Room the next morning, both Logan and Sara avoided each other. Once training started, though, Wolverine got extremely interested in watching Sara work with her sword. So much so that he was nearly decapitated by Sabretooth several times. Xavier would have reprimanded him from the observation booth had he not been laughing so hard. As the simulation shut down, the others left one by one, leaving Logan and Sara standing alone. She didn't wait for him to say anything. She attacked as soon as the door closed behind Storm, forcing him to go on the defensive. She attacked him hard and fast, her sword against his adamantium claws, not hard enough to dent or break her sword, but with sufficient impact to make him feel it. Finally he raised his voice over the clashing metal and yelled at her, "Enough! I'm sorry, I'm sorry!" 

She stopped, lowered her sword, and said sweetly, "Apology accepted."

He looked at her ruefully and said, "I'm really sorry, Sara. I didn' mean ta imply ya weren't capable o' takin' care o' yerself."

She said quietly, "I'm sorry too, Logan. When I left Richard, I promised myself I'd never let anyone make decisions for me again. Then you tried to. I got upset without realizing you were doing it for me because you were truly concerned for me. Richard did it because he just wanted to control me. There's a difference; I just didn't make that distinction. I'm sorry I flew off the handle yesterday." She sheathed her sword. "Friends?" she held out her hand.

Logan ignored the hand and wrapped his arm around her waist, pulling her to him in a crushing hug, which she returned with interest. She lifted her head to his as he was lowering his to her, and their lips met. 

They were both grateful that the showers were empty.


	6. Chapter 6

Chapter 6

Wolverine gunned his engine and spurred his bike on a little faster. The scenery was a blur as he sped up, over the hill and down. Only when he was at the bottom of it did he sneak a peek behind him at his pursuer.

Sara was about twenty feet behind him, laughing like a maniac as she pushed her bike's speed up to match his. She hadn't ridden it in a while, and her handling of the machinery below her, though skillful, was nothing like his. Wolverine turned his attention to the road ahead, to the sharp curve ahead on the road, and used all his skill to turn the bike around the sixty-degree turn. The engine whined in protest, getting louder, almost drowning out the sound of the high-pitched scream behind him. Almost.

He spun his bike around, saw no Sara behind him. He turned off the bike and sprinted back down the road to the turn. The bike lay in a twisted metal heap at the base of the tree, barely recognizable as a motorcycle. Sara lay under it, white and still. Heart hammering in shock and terror, Wolverine pulled her out from under it, pulling off her helmet. "Sara!" he leaned over her, patting her cheek desperately, "Sara, wake up, wake up, come on!" he placed his ear against her lips, to hear her breathing. She was, but there was a rapidly spreading pool of blood under her, and her heartbeat was so faint he could barely hear it.

Having a telepathic thread connecting the X-Men by Charles and Jean was a useful thing to have. He reached deep inside his own mind, feeling that faint silver thread of mental communication brighten as he called desperately down it. **JEAN! CHUCK! HELP! SARA!**

Scott was in the garage working on his Mustang when Jean stumbled in, frantically pulling on her jacket. "Jean, what's wrong?"

"Logan," she gasped out, winded from running down three flights of steps. She'd been in the Danger Room with Storm when the psychic call came through. Storm was flying directly to the scene with Rogue to check on them, and she had promised to get Scott and the car down there. She had woken Hank and told him to get the infirmary ready as she grabbed her jacket and ran for the garage. "He and Sara were racing their bikes down Hell's Road. She didn't know about the sharp turn there at the bottom of the hill and crashed. She's hurt bad."

Scott needed no further explanation, but jumped into the driver's side. Hell's Road was a desolate, little used stretch of road the X-Men used to test their vehicles and driving skills on. Wolverine was adept at cornering the turn. It wasn't that tricky, but if you didn't know there was a turn there you could mess up really bad. The state police had closed the road a few years back because people kept crashing their cars there; mostly drunk people playing daredevils. Xavier didn't know about them using the road, and they'd never told him. He would have chided them about its unsafe nature. They had all been confident about their abilities to negotiate that turn, and most of them were, though Gambit had scraped himself up rather well the last time he went down it in his pickup when he'd had a few too many. Scott couldn't imagine what had possessed Logan to take her down Hell's Road, but that could wait till later.

They weren't far from the mansion, so it didn't take long for them to reach him. He sat in the middle of the road, tears of remorse and anguish filling his eyes as he cradled the young woman in his arms. Storm and Rogue were already there, with one of Hank's mobile medikits on the ground between them. Storm already had a stabilizing collar around her neck, and Rogue was busy trying to staunch the blood flow from the shattered bone sticking out of her hip. Scott noted rather distantly the smell of alcohol on Wolverine's breath, but their first priority was Sara. She had already started to heal; the minor scrapes, cuts, and bruises were fading, and the torn, bleeding blood vessels were sealing themselves over. Not quickly enough, though. Having Storm and Rogue airlift her to the infirmary wasn't an option; one look at the collar and her hip showed that as an impossibility.

"All right. Jean, see if you can get her onto the backseat of the car with as little movement as possible. Can you keep a telekinetic cushion around her so she doesn't roll around on the way back?" Jean nodded as she lifted Sara into the car. "'Ro, Rogue, get back to the mansion. Tell Hank what happened, get him prepared for her. Logan, follow us on your bike. We'll come back for hers later." He got into the car, suppressing the urge to say what he wanted to say; something along the lines of, _you stupid ass, what the hell were you thinking taking her down this goddamned road!_ But Sara was more important.

Hank had everything ready when Jean brought Sara down to the infirmary. He didn't say anything as he hooked her up to an IV and what looked like half the Shi'ar medical equipment in the lab. "I can't do much," he said. "Her body's going to do most of it on its own, but I want to see what's going on with her hip. Get out, everyone." He put on surgical gloves and gown, just barely remembering to soften the command with a 'please.' Jean herself was getting into the same, and everyone was trying not to look at Logan as they left. Xavier met the somber group outside the room, looking worried and angry all at once.

"Logan," he snapped, "What the hell were you thinking? Didn't you even think to tell her about the hill, and the turn? She's not telepathic, did you expect that she would just automatically know? It's quite bad enough that you all use Hell's Road to practice driving on, but to drag her out there…Yes, Scott," he turned to Scott, "I know about your 'training sessions' on that road. The reason I didn't say anything was because it really is good practice for the Blackbird. But she's not a pilot, and she had no business being on that road," (back to Logan now) "and that was the stupidest, most irresponsible thing I have ever seen any of you do! Especially after you'd been out drinking! Damn it Logan, when are you going to stop being so…so…" he floundered for words, "so stupid?!" He swung his hoverchair around and left. The X-Men were left standing there in silence. Scott was about to say something when he got a good look at Logan's face and the words died unsaid. Wolverine had such an expression of self-loathing on his face and such fear and remorse and sorrow that he was probably doing a better job of lecturing himself than Scott ever could. By silent agreement they all walked away, leaving Logan staring through the observation window at the too-still form lying on the table under Hank and Jean's hands.

He stared through the window, not really seeing what was going on inside as he berated himself for his thoughtlessness in taking his love down that road. He and Sara had taken off that evening, hitting some of the local nightspots they both knew, and he knew he had drunk a lot. Things got a bit blurry after the third bar they'd visited. It had been almost one when they left the last one, and he was just fortunate that Jean and Scott had still been awake. He knew himself how lucky he'd been that the cold night air and the long ride back had taken the edge off the liquor somewhat. Sara, though, was obviously unused to drinking, and her healing factor didn't deal as efficiently as his did with the alcohol. _Dear God,_ he thought to himself, _what have I done? What is my carelessness going to cost her? Will she make it? Will she survive? Will I survive if she doesn't make it?_ But there were no answers, either from God or himself, as the night wore on and he watched Hank and Jean try to save her.

Everyone was tense and worried at the table that morning. Xavier said nothing, and ignored Logan totally when he did see him. Logan sat at the table, looking drawn and tired and terribly worried, and didn't eat anything. They didn't say much to him, though Storm, despite her own anger at Logan's carelessness, rested a hand lightly on his shoulder for a moment in sympathy.

It was almost lunch when Jean came into the kitchen, slumping with a weary sigh at the kitchen table. She didn't have to say a word; the expression on her face spoke volumes. It wasn't good news.

"She's dying," Scott said flatly.

Jean managed a small smile. "No, she's not. She woke briefly after surgery, seemed alert, and calm. The thing is… her hips…they were completely shattered when her bike fell on her. She can't feel a single thing below her waist. Hank and I tried." Her head fell on her arms, and she leaned into Scott's embrace as she began to cry. "Oh, God…we tried everything, everything the Shi'ar have given us, and it wasn't enough. It wasn't enough. We can't restore feeling to her legs. The damage to her nerves is too great to restore. We can only hope that her body fixes itself, somehow. There's nothing else we can do." She wept for a while, and the only sound was her muffled sobs and Scott's quiet ssh's as he stroked her hair. She raised her head, at last, and lashed out at Logan in her exhaustion and anger. "What in the name of God were you thinking, taking her out on that goddamned road? She hasn't been on that bike in ages, she told me so! And to get her drunk, too! She's not invincible like you!"

Logan stared at Jean, his eyes full of anguish. "Jean…" he croaked weakly. "Please, darlin', I feel bad 'nuff a'ready…"

"You! Always you! What about _her_, you selfish son of a bitch! What about how _she'll_ feel? She's going to have to learn to live with this. She's going to be in a _wheelchair_ like the Professor, and it will be **_YOUR FAULT!_** Do you hear me? Your fault! She loves you, God knows why, and this is how you repay that love! God, Wolverine, go to hell!" Jean stomped out of the room. Scott ran after her. The others stared in shock at her outburst. They turned to look at Logan.

He sat there, shocked, stunned, his soul bleeding from the cutting words. All night he had been thinking about himself, how he was sorry, how he felt, but he hadn't once considered that she might not recover, that she might be crippled. With a desperate, anguished sound he turned, ran from the room, from the mansion, getting on his motorcycle, the one he'd been trying to impress her with, and fled.

In the infirmary, Sara stared at the ceiling, tears trickling silently down her cheeks, too weak to cry aloud. She'd wanted to impress him, show him she was tough, and could handle anything, and now here she was, lying here unable to move a toe. She felt like a stupid jackass. And now Logan would think she was too. Too stupid to know when she'd reached her limits, too dumb to know when to quit, too busy trying to impress him. And now she was helpless, and he really would be tied down to her, having to babysit her. It wasn't something he could do for long without killing him inside. Logan was never meant to be tied down to anyone or anything. She would lose the only man she had ever really loved because of her stupidity. And that, more than anything else, was what made her cry. Hank had asked, when she awoke, if she wanted to see him, and she had said no. He had said nothing, and went away, leaving her alone.

She stayed in the infirmary for two weeks, unwilling to go out and face everyone. Storm and Betsy had tried to come in to talk, but she had told Hank she didn't want to see anyone, and he had told them she wasn't ready for visitors. It was partly true; her back hurt, aching so badly sometimes she would cry with the pain, but when she did, she did it silently. Neither Hank nor Jean knew how much pain she was in. Worse than the pain in her body though was the pain in her heart. Logan hadn't come to see her, not once. His rejection of her hurt more than anything else, though she told herself constantly that it was best. He wouldn't want to be tied down to a cripple. So she never asked Hank about him.

Xavier had asked about her, and each day Hank told him no. He understood what she was going through, more than anyone else could, because he had gone through it himself. But this withdrawal wasn't healthy, and one morning he insisted to Hank, quietly but firmly, that he had to see her. Hank allowed him in.

Sara looked up as Xavier came in, and he was alarmed by how pale and thin she had become. She wasn't eating well, that was obvious. She was a ghost of her former self, so changed it was painful just to look at her. "Sara?" he ventured quietly.

She looked at him listlessly. "Yes," she mumbled, her thin fingers playing with the pages of the book in her lap.

"You can't hide in here forever," he said gently, reaching out to take her hands in his. She flinched away from his touch. He didn't try again. Later he wondered why he hadn't tried to touch her mind and body again, because it would have saved them all so much heartache. But he let it go, let her have the privacy she wanted.

"I know," she said listlessly, fidgeting with her book again. "I promise, when I've healed as much as I can, I'll leave. I'll find another place to live."

"That's not what I meant," he said gently. "You're welcome to stay here. In fact, it would be easier for you to stay here. The mansion is already equipped to deal with wheelchairs and handicapped equipment. And I could help. Please, Sara. Let me help you."

Sara felt like screaming inside, but she bit her lip and stayed silent. She didn't deserve his help. She had been a stupid ass. He shouldn't have to take time out from his busy schedule to help her out. Her mother had told her, once, very long ago, when she had gotten in trouble in school, "Well, Sara, you made your bed, now lie in it. Pay for your mistakes, that's how the world works." The lesson had been beaten into her time and time again by Richard. Now she would pay in the most precious kind of coin; her own pain. So be it.

"I don't need help," she said, forcing her voice to lighten a bit. "I'm doing fine, really." She looked at the wheelchair that Hank had placed beside her bed. "I guess I should start learning how to use this thing," she said as she placed the book on her bedside table. 

Ten minutes and a lot of pain later she was in it. Xavier smiled even as he noted the lines at the corners of her eyes, and spoke telepathically to Hank. **Hank, what kind of pain medication is she on?**

Nothing yet, he sounded surprised. **She said she didn't need any, that it didn't hurt much.**

It's the same thing I said to Moira after my accident, Xavier said. **It took her a while to realize how much pain I was really in, and another long while for me to realize how much I really needed it. I think Sara's going through the same thing. Can you give her something?**

Certainly. Deed followed word, and soon Sara was feeling much more comfortable as the medication sank in. She looked ruefully at him. "Thanks. I didn't realize how much I needed that." She looked at Xavier. "Will it always hurt like this?"

Xavier looked sympathetic. "Yes, it will. Every day. I learned, eventually, to suppress it, and you will get used to it after a while and not notice it, but yes, it will hurt like this all the time." She looked like she was going to cry at that, and he almost hugged her, but she stiffened, dropped that stoic mask over her face that he was going to learn to hate over the long months ahead, and said, "Let's see how I'm supposed to get this moving."

They made their way slowly up to her room on the third floor, and soon she found herself looking at her things. Everything was the way she'd left it; almost. She thought at first that nothing had been touched, then realized with a pang that his things were gone. That fateful night she had been doing paperwork from the hospital at her desk, with Logan flipping through channels as he sprawled across her--their--bed. She had been more than a little frustrated with the work, and that was when he had suggested they go bar-hopping. She had closed up the folders, glad of a diversion as he hunted out one of his shirts from the pile of laundry at the end of her bed, and they had gone. The laundry was still there, but his clothing was gone. So he had moved out of their room too. The rejection cut like a knife through her heart, and she almost started crying again. Xavier was watching her, though, and she pushed it all down deep inside her, choosing instead to start putting all her laundry back in the drawers.

The bathroom was the hardest. She could not get herself up onto the commode, no matter how she tried, and fell quite a number of times before she admitted to Xavier, on the edge of tears, that she couldn't do it. They ended up taking his lift down to the second floor where his room was, and he allowed her to use his bathroom while he thought. The answer came to him suddenly as he went down the hall in his hoverchair. There was an empty room at the end of the hall; she could move in there, and have access to the modified bathroom he used for himself. It seemed simple to him, but she looked horrified at him when she came out and he told her what he planned.

"I'd be invading your privacy!" She couldn't imagine him actually wanting her to move in there, wanting her to share his bathroom. The inconvenience of it shocked her, that he would do that for her. But he insisted. When she would have protested again, he pointed out to her quite reasonably that she really couldn't use either of the two women's bathrooms, and it made more sense for her to use this one than for him to have to outfit another whole bathroom for her. She conceded his point, and he called the guys in to move her things from her room to the one at the end of the hall.


	7. Chapter 7

Chapter 7

The next few months were very, very long. Sara couldn't go back to work at the hospital. She stayed home now when the team went out on missions, watching sadly as the Blackbird lifted off without her. When they were injured, Hank pressed her into service as his assistant. He forbade her to use her powers. She couldn't, anyway, and that frustrated her to no end. Small scrapes, cuts, bruises, she could heal by herself, but anything harder and her power stopped cold. Gambit came back from a fight with Sabretooth one afternoon with a cut across the back of his hand deep enough to require stitches. She tried to do for him what she had done for the little boy at the hospital, and found she couldn't do it. She sank deeper and deeper into despair while trying to hold onto the fragile mask of cheerfulness she maintained for the benefit of the others.

Logan had not returned to the mansion. She had realized about a week after she had gotten out of bed that he was gone. A tiny part of her said that it was best, said she was glad he was gone, but another part of her, an increasingly larger part, cried out for him. She finally admitted to herself, a month after he had gone, that she missed him, that she loved him more than anything in the world, and she desperately wanted to see him again. But everyone was staying very quiet on that subject, and the few questions she did ask were met with monosyllabic answers and changed subjects. One night, unable to sleep, she took the lift upstairs and went into his bedroom. There, she took down one of his flannel shirts and wrapped it around herself, imagining that it was his arms wrapped around her, holding her, comforting her, loving her. She slept in his bed that night, soundlessly, dreamlessly, for the first time since the accident. After that, she took to sleeping up there when she was sure no one would notice. And if they did notice, they didn't tell her.

The truth was that they were all glad he was gone. Sara had helped them all so many times in the year since she'd come, healing wounds, taking away aches, pains, and hurts, usually at cost to herself, and on several occasions had incapacitated herself because she overextended herself on a major healing. They still blamed him for her accident, and forgiveness was a long time in coming, as they watched her struggle to do things that before had been so simple for her. They all felt acutely their luck in having whole bodies, and felt they had taken for granted Xavier's presence. He had been wheelchair bound when they had all met him, and only Moira remembered how hard he had had to struggle to find the independence he enjoyed each day. Now, watching her, they realized just how hard that battle had been for him.

Xavier himself felt a degree of satisfaction, and felt bad for it. He was used to watching the X-Men go about their business with little help from him; he was proud that Scott was the leader he had trained him to be. But he felt, every now and then, just a bit useless, unneeded. Sara changed all that. She badly needed someone who had been through all this before, to show her how to do things she had taken for granted before. And when Hank decided to begin her physical therapy, in hopes that if she tried to use her paralyzed legs her body would remember how to heal itself, she needed Xavier there to encourage her when she felt like giving up. He could knock her out of the well of self-pity she fell into on occasion, and to goad her on when she felt like giving up.

She kept to herself though, never letting him touch her, never letting Jean or Betsy inside the shield she had built around her mind. Sara was afraid of what they'd do if they saw what was inside. She needed their help desperately, and she was afraid that if she let them in, they would see she had done this to herself with her own stupidity and bull-headedness and decide to let her manage by herself, to let her lie in her own bed. She couldn't do this alone, she knew she couldn't. If Logan were still there by her side she could have faced them all, she could have faced all the pain and anguish if only he were there beside her. But he wasn't. And she had to accept that he didn't want her anymore, but it hurt so much she was sure that dying would almost be preferable to living without him.

They sensed the walls around her, but the assumed those walls were in place for the wrong reasons. She was twitchy whenever his name was mentioned, but they assumed it was because she was still upset with him for getting her in the accident on Hell's Road. They assumed she didn't want them to feel sorry for her. They assumed she was coping, that she was getting better, and sometimes her cheerful mask fooled them into thinking she was all right.

Xavier was the only one who seemed concerned about her mental welfare. He remembered his despair when he learned that no matter how he tried, how much effort he put into his therapy, he would never walk again. The only thing he had left to cling to in that dark time was Moira's love for him. But Sara didn't feel that way about anyone except maybe Logan. He wondered if she was feeling the same despair he had, but never asked, and she never told him.

Sara sat on Wolverine's bed one night, wakened from a dream of the day they had first made love. Tears made wet tracks down her face, and suddenly loneliness and despair got too much for her. She went to the bathroom she shared with Xavier and opened the bottle of pain pills she took for the constant agony in her back and swallowed half of them before her nerve gave out. She waited until reality became pleasantly fuzzy, then took the razor she used to shave her legs and drew it across her wrists. She watched her blood run down her arms dazedly, and when the medication kicked in she dropped to the floor, unconscious before she hit the cool tile.

Far away, in the wilderness of Canada, a man woke from a troubled sleep in a cot in a seedy little inn. Something had woken him; an urgent feeling that _she_ was in trouble, that _she_ needed help. He had a fuzzy recollection of seeing her fall to a tiled floor in her own blood. The feeling was so urgent he ran to the phone and called the number he had wanted to call for the last two weeks but hadn't because he was afraid to. It didn't matter now. Nothing mattered except finding if she was all right. He waited, growling impatiently, as he was connected, then another eternity as he waited for someone to pick up. A familiar voice said finally, "Hello?"

"'Ro!" he nearly exploded with relief that it wasn't Jean or Scott. ""Ro, somethin's wrong with Sara!"

There was silence for a moment, then Storm spoke again. "Logan? Is that you?"

He spoke frantically into the phone. "Yeah its me, 'Ro, please, go check on 'er! She's in trouble, please!"

"Where have you been?"

"That doesn't matter! Ororo, please, ya gotta believe me, Sara's gonna die if ya don't find her! Now!"

Silence, then a sound as if she had placed her hand over the receiver. His sharp hearing picked up the words, "Betsy, please go and see if Sara's all right. Logan is on the phone and insists that we check up on her."

"She should be in bed by now. She usually is."

"Yes, I know, but please check."

Ororo returned to the phone. "Betsy will check. Logan, where are you? We have not heard from you in months!"

"'Ro. I know ya'all blame me fer what I did. I blame meself. But how is she? Please, I gotta know."

Storm heard the desperation in his voice and said, "She has been doing fine. Charles moved her to the second floor and is sharing his facilities with her. She is doing well, and has started physical therapy with Hank to encourage her body to heal. She is quite cheerful, and is adjusting well."

He hated the quiver in his voice as he asked, "Has she asked fer me?"

Storm's voice was slightly cooler as she replied, "No. She has not. After what you have done, did you think she would? You cost her her legs, Logan. She will never be the same. It is hard to forgive such an injury--"

There was a sudden commotion in the background and he heard Jean yelling, "Hank! Someone wake him up! Oh God, she's lost too much blood, where's the damn pressure bandage! Storm, please, put pressure right there, we have to stop the bleeding--"

The line went dead.

Wolverine howled in anguish, at being so far from her and not knowing what had happened. In his frustration he didn't notice he had popped his claws and shredded the cheap plastic table and phone like it was paper. When the fog in his head cleared, he could think of only one thing; he had to see her, to know she was all right. He picked up his bag, left money on the bed to pay for the ruined table, and started traveling back to the U.S./ Canada border.

Sara heard the beeping of the heart monitor before she opened her eyes. The stories never said Heaven had beeping monitors. She moaned in anguish as Hank's concerned face swam into view as she opened blurry eyes. Her throat felt raw, and she figured that was because they had pumped her stomach. Her eyes filled with tears as she heard Jean tell someone she couldn't see, "She's coming around."

"Why didn't you let me die?" she whispered to the faces above her that she couldn't quite see. "I miss him so much. He hates me. I can't stand it. Let me die." Tears rolled down her face, tears of exhaustion, pain, despair, loneliness, and hopelessness. " Logan…I can't live without you. Please," she whispered with a voice so full of anguish her listeners felt like crying themselves. Hank quietly injected something into her IV, and she slipped back into darkness gratefully.

Jean stared at her. "We were so busy blaming him we never thought to ask her," she said more to herself than anyone else. "She's blaming herself for what happened. She thinks she should have had more sense than to try a strange road at that speed at night. She thinks that Logan left because she was hurt, because she was stupid and he doesn't love her anymore." She looked at him with horrified realization in her eyes. "She thinks we won't like her, help her, anymore if we knew she made that mistake on her own. Oh, God, Charles, if we'd touched her mind before, when she woke first, we'd have found that all these months of pain for her were unnecessary. For her and Logan." She turned to Storm. "Where did he say he was?"

"He didn't," Storm said. "I hung up on him before he could say where he was. I asked him, but he was so insistent on my finding her and helping her we did not have a chance to exchange locations."

Xavier headed for the door. "I will try to locate him using Cerebro," he said. "If we can convince him to come home we won't have to worry about her trying to kill herself again. If he doesn't come he'll be signing her death warrant. She won't stop."

He emerged from Cerebro's chamber quite a long time later, exhausted and bitter. "I can't find him. He's not in range. I hope to God he's on his way here." Scott, Jean, Ororo, Betsy and the others fell silent.

Two weeks of hard traveling, stopping only to get the barest minimum of sleep and food at cheap, inexpensive inns, brought Wolverine to New York City. He barely stopped there, driven by the overwhelming need to get back, to see Sara, to know she was all right. Since the terrible dream of her dying he had been plagued by others of the same sort, dreams he couldn't remember in the morning but that left him with the certainty that once he got back, the danger to her would be over. It was the end of a crisp, cold February day, with snow on the ground and ice on the lake behind the mansion. He paused across the street at the end of the drive, suddenly uncertain as he saw a dark-haired figure in a wheelchair come out and look over the lawn toward the road. For a moment she didn't see him, and then she did. The breath caught in Logan's chest as he saw her fully for the first time in four months. She looked thin and pale, lost and lonely, her shoulders drooping in despair, her face lined with sadness and pain. Then she saw him. There was uncertainty in her frame as she turned the chair to face him, then suddenly a look of pure joy came over her face. "Logan!" she screamed. "Logan!" She leaned forward, as if she were going to get up and run to him, but of course she couldn't. His eyes hungrily drank in the sight of her as he stepped into the street. His senses were so full of her that he didn't see the car until it was too late. The sound of screeching tires and squealing brakes filled his ears, and the world seemed to be turning around and around, then there was blackness.

Sara screamed as she saw the man she loved go down under the bumper of a car before her. She jumped up and ran down the walk, screaming his name, and crumpled to her knees beside him, whimpering his name brokenly, over and over. "Please, dearling, please, don't die! Please come back! I love you, I can't live without you, if you die I will too! Oh, love, please, you can't die, I just found you again!" Her hands were frantically caressing his face and the bloody scratches on his cheeks and hands. Suddenly she felt something inside her break, like a dam, and she felt her old healing fire flood her, filling her palms with its familiar blue radiance as the scrapes, scratches, and bruises healed on Logan's body. She felt a blinding pain in her legs as the torn flesh in his legs transferred to her own, but she barely registered it as his eyes opened and he pinned her with the brown eyes she so loved. 

"Sara," he whispered. "Darlin', fergive me, please. I didn' mean it, I f'rgot ta tell ya 'bout that turn. It was my fault, please f'rgive me, darlin'," and he looked at her with eyes that pleaded for her understanding. She kissed him, long and hard, on the lips she had so longed for, feeling the two-week stubble on his chin abrade her face, and not caring.

"Logan," she whispered back, "love, dearling, listen, there's nothing to forgive! I was stupid, I was trying to impress you, to show you there was nothing you could do that I couldn't, and I paid for that stupidity myself! I thought you wouldn't love me now you knew I was crippled, that you wouldn't want to tie yourself to a cripple like me."

His eyes widened. "Sara. No matta what ya done, what ya look like, I'll always love ya! How could ya even think I'd stop lovin' ya when ya got hurt?" He kissed her back, with all the hunger in his soul, his senses full of her; seeing her, feeling her gentle hands warm against his cold cheek, her legs under his head, the smell of her blood…Blood!

He sat up as that smell reached him, and looked at her. She knelt there in the middle of the icy, slippery road, swaying in shock. He caught her as she fell, looking at her legs, thin, wasted, the muscles atrophied from disuse, and…mangled? His legs were whole, healed, and he stared at them numbly, his mind trying to wrap itself around the significance of that. The sight of drops of her blood staining the snow snapped him out of the numb state he was in, and he sprinted up the drive calling for the others at the top of his lungs.

Sara woke to unbelievable, unbearable pain coming from her legs. She whimpered helplessly with it, crying in anguish until she suddenly felt a tingling in her arm and the pain receded. She opened her eyes, to see Hank, Jean, Xavier, and Scott leaning over her. Her throat tightened. "Logan?" Scott stepped aside, and Logan took his place. "What happened?" she whispered, reaching for his hand.

Hank's blue furry head filled half her vision. "You got up and walked, Sara!" he exclaimed jubilantly. You saw Logan get struck by that car and you ran to get him. Not only that, your healing power came back and you healed him! The metal front of that car drove into his legs but gave way to the adamantium laced bone. His flesh was torn but the bone didn't break. When you touched him you absorbed those injuries--"

Sara's mind wrapped around the significance of that. "I can feel it," she whispered to him. "I can feel the pain in my legs. That means I'm not paralyzed anymore. I can walk! Oh, dear God, thank you, I can walk again!" 

This time they were tears of joy, not pain or sorrow.


	8. Chapter 8

Chapter 8

"That will be absolutely all for today," Hank said firmly as Sara lowered herself back into the wheelchair, gasping. "If you push yourself too hard you just might end up damaging something else. Your power does have limits, Sara." 

Sara sat in the chair, her weakened leg muscles aching. She was whole, physically healed, but three months of not being able to use her legs had left the muscles weak and useless. Hank was using the physical therapy to redevelop the strength, but it was slow going, and there were times when she just wanted to give up, to stop, and just stay in her wheelchair because it hurt too damn much.

But Logan wouldn't let her. He was there, constantly encouraging her, helping her, holding her when she cried, goading her when she wanted to give up, and just his presence helped her on the long winter days when she felt depressed. She was ashamed of what she'd done, now, and Logan had lectured her on that point, quietly but thoroughly.

"How could ya even think I'd stop lovin' ya?" he whispered quietly into her hair as they sat in her bedroom one night, watching TV and just talking. He stroked the long, soft dark hair, hugged the woman he'd missed so much. "I wanted ya so much, Sare, I missed ya so much. I thought it was my fault ya crashed, and ya'd blame me. Everyone else did." He swallowed the lump in his throat, blinking away the stinging in his eyes. "Jean tol' me ta go ta hell," he said. "That night, when I woke up knowin' you was dyin', I realized what hell was. It was not bein' wit' ya." He hugged her tight. "Sare, please don't do that again. Ya scairt the hell outta me!"

She hugged him back, her heart full of feelings she couldn't express but that she knew he knew, and mumbled into his chest, "I promise."

Jean had apologized to him after he'd come back. "God, Logan, I'm so sorry," she had murmured brokenly as she hugged him to welcome him back. "I was tired, and not really thinking straight, and I said some really terrible things. Thank God you came back." He hugged her back.

He was with her all the time now, and they had all agreed it would be best for her to move back in with him. The problem was where? Her room was at the other end of the hall from his, and they really wanted him to be close to her in case she tried to kill herself again. Xavier finally remembered that the previous owner had outfitted a couple of rooms at the back of the house for servants, with a separate bathroom and outer entrance. With very little refurbishing, it would serve the purpose.

And so it proved. Sara was on the first floor now, with access to everything, and Logan was with her, which was the most important thing to her. The room was bigger than her old one, and there was enough space for him to move his things into the room as well. There was no need for separate rooms anymore; everyone knew they were lovers, and though it caused quite a bit of a stir in the mansion, the two were blissfully unaware of it all. Sara's recovery was now rapid, and they were all thankful that Logan had come back.

All her old cheerfulness came back, unfeigned this time. Logan was becoming extra-sensitive to her moods, and so when she seemed depressed one morning, he asked her why. She gave him no answer. He found out later, when he went looking for some bit of paperwork or other that she needed for the hospital, and saw a card lying on her dresser. Curious, he opened it. It was a birthday card, from her husband. It read, "Sara: Hope you're enjoying your birthday, bitch. And remember when you get back, I'll still owe you that special present you get every year. Richard."

It was her birthday, and he hadn't known. It explained her sadness. He quickly located the paper she needed, ran out to the car, and gave it to her where she waited in Betsy and Warren's Ferrari. When they drove off, he ran back inside and found Jean. "Jean!" he called, seeing her coming out of her and Scott's bedroom. "Can I talk to ya?" 

"Sure. What's up?" Jean waited for him to catch up.

"It's Sara's birthday t'day. I just foun' out." He decided not to mention how he'd found out. "An' I wanna get her somethin', but I don't know what ta get her. Has she said anythin' ta ya?"

Jean grinned. "So that's what she's been all quiet about today. I wonder why she didn't tell us."

"Jean. Ya know how she is. She doesn't like a big ol' fuss made o' her ' bout anythin'. But I figure she feels a little blue, an' needs cheerin' up."

Jean thought. "There was something," she said slowly. "The last time we were at the mall, she was looking at a lovely gold pendant she really liked. I told her to get it, but she decided not to. It would surprise her if you got it for her, but she'd like it." She grinned wider, suddenly. "And while we're at it, maybe we'll have a party for her too. Do you know how old she is?"

Logan thought back to that horrible birthday card. "Twenty- seven," he said.

"Scott!" her husband came out of their room. "Logan found out its Sara's birthday today. Do you think we could run down to the mall for some gifts while you get something organized for her here? I just 'pathed Betsy not to bring her back for a couple hours. Will that be enough time?"

Scott smiled broadly, and he gave Jean a kiss. "See you later, darling. Yeah, I think we could get something together for her in a couple hours."

Jean grabbed her keys. "Let's go."

Logan hadn't been shopping with a woman in quite a while; Sara wasn't much of a shopper herself. Rogue had invited herself along, and between the two of them, they found a number of things at the stores they had seen Sara admiring often enough that they were fairly certain she would like. He bought her a couple things himself, besides the jewelry Jean pointed out to him. He knew the instant he'd seen it that Sara would like it; it was a delicate four-pointed gold star with a deep purple stone in the center of it. The stone matched her eyes exactly, and the pendant was small enough to be worn comfortably every day. As they were going through a clothing store, he remembered the habit she had of raiding his closet for his sweaters and wearing them. They were oversized and comfortable, she had told him once. So he stopped and bought her a thick cotton sweater that matched the necklace he'd bought. His last stop was at a leather- goods store, where he bought her something he knew she'd wanted for a while; a leather biker jacket like his. His purchases done, he watched the two women choose things for the others to give her, and they went home. 

The mansion was a bustle of activity. The dining room was festooned with a huge birthday banner he remembered from Hank's birthday a month ago, and balloons hung in little clusters around the room. Storm had driven out to the local supermarket and come back with a huge cake with Sara's name on it, and was in the process of placing candles on it. It was chocolate, of course; Sara loved chocolate. He watched the goings-on with some amusement. _This oughta cheer her up a bit,_ he thought as he went upstairs to privately wrap her gifts himself. He wasn't really good at it, but he felt it would mean more to her to see that he'd made the effort.

She stood, startled, as Betsy shoved her into the room and everyone yelled "Happy birthday!" Her eyes took in the decorations, the cake, the pile of presents in the corner, and looked at Logan with a 'later-for-you' look that held a lot of humor in it, and threw herself into the revelry with a full heart. Logan would never forget the look she gave him when she unwrapped his gifts, nor the way she instantly put on the necklace he had gotten as if she'd never take it off.

She lay, much later, in their bed, wearing nothing but that necklace and driving him nuts when he came back in from working on his bike. "How did you know?" she asked softly, getting up and pulling him down on the bed next to her, removing his shirt as he did so. He pulled her into his arms and cuddled her for a moment, enjoying the sensuous pleasure of having her bare skin rubbing his.

"I saw the card Ryan sent ya," he said. "Sare, why didn't ya tell us?"

She tugged at his belt. "I didn't want a big fuss made about my birthday," she said. "Believe it or not, that's the first birthday card I've ever gotten from Richard. The last two years, he'd stop by the apartment and give me my present personally." The tone of voice in which she said 'present' left little doubt in his mind that the present had been pain.

"I wish you didn't have a healing factor," he said impulsively.

She stared at him, startled. "Why? I'm lucky I have it. I tell myself that every day."

"Because if you didn't have it, everyone would have seen the scars he left on your body as well as your soul, and you wouldn't have had any problems finding a lawyer," he said quietly. "And people would have believed you."

She sat back against the head of the bed, watching as he stripped off his greasy jeans and tossed them into the laundry hamper they shared. "Logan, if I didn't have my healing factor whether I had scars or not would be moot," she said, her face unreadable. "I would be dead."

Logan cursed and sat down on the bed beside her, holding her. "He hurt you that bad?" he said, his heart aching.

"Yes," she whispered. 

He hugged her tightly, and she turned in his arms to face him. "I love ya," he said. "I will never hurt ya. And I will never let anyone hurt ya like that again. I'll kill anyone who tries." 

"Don't kill," she said. "It will leave scars on your soul. I couldn't bear seeing that."

He tilted her chin up to meet his gaze. " But you have too many already." He kissed her lips, kissed her jawline back to her neck, left a trail of butterfly kisses down her neck to the hollow of her throat, and just before he lost himself in passion, he heard her whisper, "I won't let it happen."


	9. Chapter 9

Chapter 9

They wandered into the breakfast room one morning, and Jean handed Sara two letters. Curious as to who would be sending her mail, she ripped them open. Her face went white with shock, and she sat back heavily in the chair that Logan held for her.

"What is it, Sare?" he asked. She made no reply, instead ripping up the papers and limping across the kitchen to drop them in the trashcan. She was rather silent and withdrawn the rest of the day but wouldn't tell him why, no matter how he asked.

The next morning, there were two more. She dropped them into the trash without comment.

The next morning there were more, three of them. She went white when she saw them, and trashed them immediately.

There was nothing the fourth morning, and she was about to breathe a sigh of relief when Xavier came into the breakfast room. "Sara," he said gently, "I just received a note from my lawyer. Apparently the Senator has been trying to contact you regarding some personal business that his lawyer believes is quite urgent, and you have not responded. Did you receive the notes?"

"Yes," she said, tight-lipped. "I got the letters, and no, I really don't want to see them, but I don't really have a choice, now, do I?" She spun and limped off.

Logan found her later, sitting on one of the benches in the garden, gasping in the stiff autumn wind. He threw her coat around her shoulders as he sat down beside her. "Let me guess. You're going to try to talk me into acceding to Charles's wish that I go talk to Richard."

"No," he said, and she looked at him in surprise. "I don't want ya ta see that bastard. I just wanna know what he's harassin' ya fer this time so I can go kill him." She turned to stare at him in surprise, and he nodded. "I'm gonna kill him fer what he did ta ya," he said grimly, his face cold and set. "Sare, didja know ya talk in yer sleep? Sometimes I wake up to hear ya screamin'. Whatever yer dreamin' about, it hurt ya bad. I've seen ya convulse in yer sleep. It hurts me ta see what he's done to ya. I don't ever want him ta touch ya again. Tell me why he wants ta see ya now."

Sara digested that in silence, but she couldn't bring herself to talk to him. Not about this. "I can't," she said sorrowfully. "I'm sorry, Logan, I just can't. I have to work this out on my own." She stood, clutching her coat around her thin shoulders and limped off back to the mansion. He was left sitting there, wondering what was so terrible she couldn't tell him about it.

Sara tapped lightly on Xavier's study door. "Charles?" she said before entering. It was a habit of hers: she couldn't just walk in like the others did. He looked up and invited her in with a gesture as he spoke to someone on the phone. He talked for a moment more, then hung up and gave her his full attention. She stood for a moment, twisting her sweater around in her fingers before she got up the nerve to say what she wanted to say. "I'm going into town to talk to Richard and his lawyer," she burst out, "and I don't want Logan to come with me. I think I know what they want, and it will hurt him to hear some of it. I don't want to do that to him. Could someone else drive me into town?"

"Certainly," Xavier looked relieved. The phone calls he had been getting from Ryan and his attorney were just short of harassment. He hoped the relief didn't show as he said, "Did you have anyone in mind to take with you?"

Sara detected the relieved stance, and her feelings of guilt increased. She should have known they would bug Xavier. She would have to meet them if she wanted them to leave him alone. 'Jean mentioned something about needing to go into town for groceries with Ororo. I thought perhaps I could go with them, but we'd need to take the van. Jean's Miata doesn't have room for my crutches."

"Go ahead." Xavier said, taking the keys for his van from a desk drawer.

She waited until she saw the two women drive off to the grocery store down the road before she turned and went into the lawyer's office. She knew exactly who he was. She had seen him often enough at Richard's weekly poker games, the ones he had set up for some of his friends. She remembered, too, that he had a cruel streak a mile wide, a streak that had caused her so much pain. But she was free, and they couldn't hurt her anymore, or so she thought, as she swung into the office on her crutches. "Mr. Drew--" she started to say, and was grabbed from behind and a hand was clamped over her mouth.

"Well, well," her husband's voice purred in her ear. "My prodigal wife returns home."

Sara slammed her crutch into his shin, causing him to yelp and grab his bruised leg. "I'm not coming back," she said defiantly, swinging around to face him. "You wanted to talk to me, so talk. Tell me what you want so I can say no and get the hell out of here."

"Nice try," he snarled at her. "You can't go anywhere until your friends come back. We saw them leave. So make nice and give us what we want."

"What do you want?" she asked warily.

Lewis Drew snatched her crutches away from her, letting her fall to the floor. "We want you to come back," he said. "We miss our little poker prize. I won last week, but you weren't there as my reward."

He advanced on her.

"No," Sara panicked, and began to limp toward the door. "No, you can't, leave me alone, just leave me alone--" but they ignored her as they grabbed her and slung her facedown across the conference table. She fought them with all her strength, but they were too strong for her and Richard held her as Lewis Drew ripped her clothes off. She screamed as she felt the incredible stabbing pain between her legs as they violated her.

She could do nothing. She was completely helpless, and at their mercy as they used her brutally. She grasped the tiny gold star around her neck and forced herself not to think about the vile things they were doing to her, trying instead to think about Logan, his gentle hands, his love, and thanking God that he wasn't here to see this. And when they grabbed her crutches and used them on her, she stopped thinking about anything at all except surviving to see him again. Dazed and in agony, she barely noticed when they left, dropping her broken, bloodstained crutches beside her body, which was already beginning to heal.

Jean and Storm took a great deal of time doing the grocery shopping, trying to give her as much time as possible to conduct her business. They didn't have an inkling that anything was wrong until they drove up in front of the office. Sara was sitting on the curb, staring blankly into the street, her broken crutches beside her. They saw the torn clothing, the empty look on her face, and knew something was terribly wrong. Ororo jumped out and helped her climb into the van, trying to be as gentle as possible as she heard Sara gasp with the pain in her loins. Apart from the rips in her clothes, she looked all right, but they could tell something terrible had happened from the bloodstains on her clothes and her wooden crutches, the stiffness with which she moved, and the way she cradled her stomach. "Sara!" Jean cried in shock, "what happened?"

"Nothing that hasn't happened before," Sara said tonelessly, refusing to meet their eyes.

They refused to allow her to retreat into her room when they got home, but forced her into the kitchen to clean the dried blood off her. Wolverine came running in response to Jean's frantic telepathic call for Xavier. He grabbed her and spun her around, shaking her roughly. "Sara, what the hell happened?" he demanded, staring in shock at the torn clothing and the bruises on her face and body. She stayed silent in his arms, refusing to meet his eyes, refusing to tell him what had happened. Jean and Storm stood around them, arms folded. 

"She wouldn't tell us, Logan," Jean said, her voice anguished. "We tried. Sara, if you can't tell us then at least tell him! We're your friends, we're here to help, if he hurt you, tell us so we can call the police!"

"Enough," Charles said sternly, coming into the room. "Sara, tell me what happened." 

"No," she whispered, her eyes fastened on the floor in front of her.

"Sara, you must tell me. If you don't, I will go into your mind and find out."

She stared at him in shock. "You wouldn't," she whispered.

Xavier hated the terrified look in her eyes, but hated even more the thought of how badly she had been hurt. Even worse was the fact that he felt guilty for pressing her to go to the meeting. "I will. Sara, please don't make me do that to you. I will if you don't tell us. This is important, Sara, if they hurt you we need to know."

"No," she whispered in anguish. "I can't, please don't make me." She turned to run out of the room, but her bruised legs wouldn't cooperate, and stumbled into Logan's arms. Before she could regain her feet, Xavier was in her mind.

She had only the barest of shields, so it was easy to slip into her mind and pull up the memory. He stared, sickened, as he watched them violate and beat her almost senseless. He gasped, and pulled out of her mind, letting her collapse against Logan, sobbing.

"He raped her," Charles whispered. "And he beat her. With his lawyer, too. And it wasn't the first time, either. Oh, Sara, it's not your fault, please believe us--"

Sara pulled away from all of them, drawing her hurt around her like a cloak. She couldn't stand the look in their eyes. "No," she cried to them, "it is my fault, my fault for marrying him to begin with, my fault for staying with him after the first time he beat me, my fault for not leaving when I had the chance. I could have fought him, but I didn't. I gave in; I let him use me for those damn poker games. I let his friends use my body for their sick games and desires, and now you know, and you'll think I'm a whore, a slut, like they called me then, and I deserve all of it, because that's what I am." Her voice trailed off in a choked sob, and she pulled away from all of them, limping out of the room. Logan ran after her.

She was sitting on a bench in the garden, coatless, shivering in the chill wind that blew through her torn clothes. Logan's heart ached as he knelt in front of her, slipping a hand under her chin and pulling her chin up until she met his eyes. She was bleeding quietly to death from a major soul wound, and he didn't have the faintest idea how to heal it. "Sara," he whispered, "I love ya. Yer not a whore, I don't care what that son of a bitch husband o' yers says. You're a strong, brave, wonderful woman, and I love ya. Please, darlin', believe me." He wrapped his arms around her and held her for a moment, feeling her body shiver in his arms. "Now come in, please, 'fore ya freeze." She got up when it became clear to her that he wasn't going to be placated with anything less than obedience. He got her to their room, where she showered and slipped into a nightgown, and got into bed. Logan lay beside her until he was certain she was asleep, then went hunting for Xavier.

The X-Men sat soberly around the War Room table, and the temperature of the room felt about ten degrees colder than the rest of the mansion. Cold, cold rage filled the room, rage at what had been done to her, and the desire to hurt the Senator as he had hurt her. Xavier looked grim as he spoke. "Sara's husband and his lawyer beat and raped her. They hurt her, terribly, but from what I saw in her mind, it's not the first time she's had this happen to her. Her husband did this to her all the time. When he had poker games, the person who won got to use Sara for a night." All the faces around the table mirrored the sick horror he felt. "She doesn't want to talk about it. She thinks it's her fault that it happened, because she married him and stayed with him. That idea was probably planted into her mind by him."

"Beaten int' her's more like it," Gambit snarled, flipping his cards through his fingers. "Gambit t'ink dis Senator need a taste o' his own medicine, no?"

"I am as upset as you all are," Xavier snapped. "I told her to go. I didn't know they were going to hurt her. But we can't take matters into our own hands, Gambit, no matter how angry we all are." Gambit sat back, still looking angry.

"She thinks we will blame her for what happened to her," Storm said into the silence as Logan slid into a seat at the end of the table. "Professor, how do we convince her we don't?"

"Ya don't," Logan said. He stood. "Chuck, I wanna take her away. Sorta like a vacation, get her away from all this crap, get her to where it's just me an' her, where she can't run away, an' gimme a chance ta talk some sense inta her head. Ryan's beaten all sortsa crazy ideas in her head, an' there ain't none o' yer mind tricks gonna work with her till she's let go of it an' is ready ta accept it ain't her fault."

Xavier said quietly, "It was on my mind to ask you to do the same thing. Go, please, with our blessings. Take as much time as you need."

As the meeting ended, Warren stopped him. "Logan. Did you have a particular destination in mind?" he asked. Logan shook his head.

"Here." Warren pressed into Logan's hand a set of keys. "My family has a summer cabin in Washington State. It's not used at this time of year, and I thought it might be a good place to take her to sort things out. It's across Suksan lake, at the foot of Mount Suksan. It's fall there, and the scenery is beautiful. It's not much, just a rustic cabin, but it's a good place for solitude. I took Betsy there once, and she loved it."

Logan smiled to himself as he considered the possibilities. The mountains…oh, that would suit them well indeed. Sara couldn't run from him there; she would have to stay, and listen to him, and he could talk some sense into her. Yes, that would do well indeed. "Thanks, Warren," he said, palming the cabin's keys. "We'll go there."


	10. Chapter 10

Chapter 10

Logan and Sara got out of the rental pickup, staring at the 'cabin' Warren had given them the keys to. Sara finally sucked in a breath and turned to him. "I think Warren and I need to have a chat about the definition of 'rustic cabin," she said.

Looking at it, Logan had to agree. The cabin was actually a lovely sprawling rancher. Inside there were three bedrooms, a full basement, a spacious modern kitchen with new appliances and cabinets stocked with canned and non-perishable goods. There was a small produce store down the road they had just come up where they could buy whatever groceries they needed. The basement downstairs was equipped with a pool table, couch, bar, and TV/stereo combination. The family room upstairs had comfortable couches and chairs in it, and a large working fireplace. A peek out the kitchen window showed the woodpile beside the tool shed in back of the house was full. The master bedroom had a large king-sized bed in it, and the two smaller bedrooms had queen-sized beds. Sara put her things in one of the smaller bedrooms, but when Logan brought his bag up, she whispered timidly, "Logan…please…" She didn't have to finish. He knew. He moved his things to the master bedroom, hurt by her rejection but understanding of the reasons.

It had only been a few days since the incident. Logan had rushed her out of the mansion because her nightmares had woken everyone. They had heard her screaming in agony and terror three times that night, and each time she had been so lost in the dreams Jean had had to slip into her mind to wake her up. Jean didn't tell anyone what she had seen in Sara's mind, but Scott told Logan later that she hadn't been able to sleep afterward.

Sara hadn't been able to sleep with him in their room, either. She moved back to her old room on the third floor. She had tried to avoid him…all the men, in fact, and stayed as far away from Xavier as she could. She had spent the intervening time packing her things, alone, roaming the garden and the woods. Logan had moved back into his old room temporarily, but had spent little time sleeping there, since he spent most of the night hours lying before her door. The second night she had gone sleepwalking and had almost fallen down the stairs. 

The trip to Seattle by plane had been spent in strained silence, with her just speaking a word every now and then, trying to cover the silences, but her gaiety was missing, and they both knew that.

The afternoon they arrived they had taken to get adjusted to things. The view from the back porch was gorgeous. Fall had burst in a riot of color over the mountainside, and the old, weathered mountain watching the house from a distance was mirrored to perfection in the clear, cold lake below it, with a long, green lawn stretching from the back porch to the water's edge. Logan went down to the store to purchase groceries, and the early fall sunset saw him grilling steaks outside as she prepared a salad and vegetables over the stove. They ate in the family room, watching TV, and later after the dishes were cleared and they were sitting in front of the fireplace, watching the flames dance, she reached out and timidly touched him.

It broke the ice, and he pulled her to him, wrapping a thick fleece blanket around both of them as she curled up against him. He tried to say something to her, but she simply stared into the flames and didn't answer. So he gave up, just holding her, listening to the peace and quiet of the mountains, until his eyes grew heavy and he drifted off to sleep.

He was awakened by a low moan from the woman beside him. Normally a light sleeper, he was awake instantly, his eyes taking only a moment to adjust to the bright moonlight that streamed in from the window and the glowing embers that were all that was left of the fire he had made earlier. Tears were making silver tracks down her cheeks from her squeezed shut eyes, and her lips moved. The words that came out were so quiet he had to strain to catch it. "Please," she was whispering, "Please, don't hit me anymore, oh, God, Richard, please!" Her voice rose with each word. "Richard please don't hit me anymore please let me go oh God you're hurting me please stopit stopit stopit STOP IT!" she screamed in agony, throwing her body clear of the couch, her eyes open now but seeing nothing but the dream. Logan scrambled after her, pushing the low coffee table out of the way before she hit her head on it. She was shrinking away from him, in the grasp of her nightmare, and couldn't tell the difference between him and the Richard in her dream. He followed her as she crawled away from him, to the corner right beside the fireplace, and he was afraid that if she moved suddenly she would fall into the fire. "Sara," he spoke her name, low and calm and reassuring, "Sara."

She jerked with each repetition of her name, her body convulsing as if she were being tortured. The muscles in her body were taut, her head thrown back, and her strangled gasps punctuated the night's silence. He reached for her, not knowing how to snap her out of it. "Sara!" With a sudden lurch she threw herself sideways. There was the horrible stench of burning flesh, and an agonized scream, and suddenly Sara was awake, clutching the hand that had touched the hot embers and was now blistering. He caught her up, dropping her on the couch, and came back in moments with a cool cloth that would take the stinging out of the burn. It would hold the pain at bay until she could heal. She sat there, sobbing in pain. He wrapped the cold towel around her hand and then hugged her hard, for a long time, until she stopped crying. "Sara," he said when he let her go, "tell me."

She stared at the cloth wrapped around her hand. "He'd just formed his poker club, and it was the first time they'd asked for me. Before, it was whatever prostitute they happened to bring, because no one knew how he'd react to someone wanting to use his wife. But he offered me to the winner that night, and even told them I was a virgin. I didn't want to go with the one who won, because I'd seen him at one of the state functions and I knew he was married. Richard flew into a rage there in front of them and ripped my clothes off, then tied me to the table with his tie and beat me with his belt until I bled. I gave in. I promised to never disobey him again, and he made me prove it by letting them use me, all of them, that night. Some of the guys never came back because they didn't like what he did to me, but they never told anyone.

"After that, he told them that I was a mutant, that I could heal myself. They came back the next night, and found what he said was true; despite the beating of the night before, my body was whole. After that, there was nothing they didn't try and nothing they wouldn't do to make me hurt, to make me scream and beg. It was called the poker club; it was really a sadists' club." She took a deep breath, but the pent-up pain and terror wouldn't be denied any longer, and her words tumbled out on top of one another as if she couldn't talk fast enough. "At first the beatings were painful enough. But I soon got used to it; the human body can get used to practically anything. 

Her eyes were glazed as she stared at the dead fire. "Then they found out it didn't really hurt anymore. Richard telepathically probed me when I was being beaten up one night and found I wasn't hurting as much as my screaming made it sound." She drew in a ragged breath. "They came up with other ways of making me hurt. They raped me, they whipped me, they brutalized me, and it didn't matter how much I screamed, or begged. They would hurt me every poker night and expect me to be healed and waiting for them again when they came back. I was their whore, their toy. I didn't have any purpose except to provide them with amusement in the form of my screams." She fell silent.

Logan had to remind himself how to breathe. She had told him something he hadn't thought of. "Sara," he croaked. "Yer a virgin…every time I touch ya…"

She looked at him. "Yes."

"But…that means…I hurt ya…when I…when we…"

"Yes," she said softly. "Every time. But I barely feel it, Logan, really. And you love me. You're gentle. And that balances the pain."

His mind tumbled head over mental heels and landed somewhere in the pit of his stomach. He hurt her. _He hurt her._ Sara, his love, who had felt pain from her husband, now endured it from him. He couldn't imagine what that must feel like. "I never knew," he said shakily. "Sara, why didn' ya tell me?"

She looked at him in puzzlement. "It's not a big deal, Logan, really," she said gently. "Mostly I don't even feel it." She got up and walked over to the lamp, switching it on to examine the blisters on her palm. She pulled the cloth off it when she saw the skin was starting to heal already, and walked over to him, snuggling down beside him as he turned the TV on. They watched it in silence for a while, and when Logan looked down at her an hour later, she was asleep. Real sleep, this time, not the nightmare ridden restless sleep she had had the last several days. She didn't wake as he carried her to the room she had chosen, and tucked her into the bed. Then he went to his bedroom to catch some much-needed sleep himself.

He woke to bright sunlight streaming in through the window. A glance at the clock showed him it was almost eleven in the morning. He jumped out of bed and opened the door to his room. Sara's door was open, and there was a delicious smell of bacon and eggs wafting from down the hall, accompanied by the smell of strong black coffee. He stumbled down the hall and flung himself down at the kitchen table, accepting with an unintelligible murmur the mug of black coffee she handed him.

Two cups later he remembered what words were. One more cup later, and he remembered how to use them. "Morning," he told her.

She laughed; a sound he hadn't heard from her in a week. "Whatso funny?" he mumbled around a mouthful of eggs and bacon.

She came up behind him, her warm breath tickling the back of his neck. "Your hair," she giggled. "Have you ever got bed head!" and she went off into peals of laughter.

He stumped off down the hall to the bathroom, where he took a quick look in the mirror as he took care of business, and began to laugh himself. He did look funny. Sara joined him, giggling quietly as she ducked shyly around the doorframe and stood behind him. He reached for her, grabbed her, and rumpled her already tousled black mane. She shrieked in laughter and hobbled awkwardly out of the bathroom, with him in pursuit. She made her way into his bedroom and put the bed between them as he tried to grab her. He went left. She went right. He went right. She went left. 

Exasperated, he lunged across the huge bed and caught the end of her nightgown. There was a sound of ripping cloth, and he was suddenly holding a pile of fabric, and she stood nude. Before he could apologize, she giggled and lay across the bed opposite him. Sunlight gleamed on the firm smooth skin of her back and legs, which was marred by long red welts from her heels up her legs to her shoulders. The sight sobered him immediately, and he moved closer to her, his fingers tracing the welts lightly.

"I'm sorry," she said soberly.

"For what?" he asked in surprise.

"For not telling you what I was doing and where I was going. I could have avoided all of it if I'd taken you with me. They wouldn't have tried anything with you there."

As she spoke, he was digging in the bag he had placed beside the bed, and he came up with a jar of ointment Hank had given him. "Put this on her welts," Hank had directed. "They are healing, but until they do, they'll hurt. It'll probably be a week before they're completely gone." Logan inspected the label, and noted that it was a topical anesthetic. Until her hand healed, it would probably feel good on her hand too. So he slathered the gel onto her hand first, then started at her shoulders and began to work his way down her back to her buttocks and legs. "Sara," he said quietly.

"Mmm-hmm?" she said drowsily. "Ooh, that feels good."

"How didja come ta marry that son o' a bitch?"

Sara propped her chin on her folded hands. "My dad was in the Army. Gianni Rianetti commanded the base he was posted at during my freshman year in high school. He had a son, named Riccio. My father set up a date between Richard and me. I did like him. He seemed to be the perfect gentleman, kind, considerate, caring, and handsome. All the girls in school wanted to be with him, but he spent his time with me." She sighed. "Then we were both accepted to Columbia, him for law, me for medical. We continued our relationship into college. It seemed to please my father to no end, and I wasn't sure why. The day I graduated Columbia medical school he proposed, and I accepted. I thought I knew him. It turned out I didn't." she laughed bitterly. "I didn't even know my own father. It wasn't until we'd been married for a couple months that I found out that my father had gotten a promotion when I married Richard. And a few months later I found out that my father had forged my name on a prenuptial agreement giving Richard control of the company that my mother left me, Meredith Pharmaceuticals.

"I never knew. My mother had been married when she had an affair with my father, and she had me, gave me to him, and left to go back to her husband." She sighed. "I only saw her sporadically when I was young. Maybe twice in a year, if I was lucky. It was quite a shock when I discovered she left me her company in her will when she died in a car accident six years ago." She sucked in a breath as Logan applied the ointment to a particularly nasty gash at the base of her spine, then continued when the pain abated. "Richard knew, too. That was the only reason he married me. So he could have access to all that money. He was ambitious; he's had his eye on a senate seat since he was in high school. He even changed his name; Rianetti was a large name in the Italian Mafia, and he didn't want the press to find out, so he changed his name to Richard Ryan. So they got what they wanted; Dad got a promotion, Rick got money and a wife the press loved, and me…" she snorted bitterly as Logan listened in silence. "I married the man I loved, and thought he loved me. Guess what? He didn't." 

She bit her lip, her eyes faraway as she talked. "Things were all right for a while. The first six months were heaven. We both realized we were mutants—"

"He's a mutant too?" Logan interrupted.

"Yes. He doesn't advertise it, though; no one really knows but me. He never told his parents. He's a telepath." She went on. "Then he started staying out late, and leaving early. He spent less and less time at home. Then one evening when he came home I smelled another woman's perfume on him. I asked him where he had been. He hit me and told me it was none of my business. That was the first time." She sat up, twisting a heavy lock of her hair in her fingers as Logan applied ointment to her lower legs. "It just got worse from there. He would get angry about the smallest things." She was quiet for a moment. "I was working at the hospital late on our first anniversary. I met him at the restaurant. He was upset, and we went home. That night was the first time he beat me unconscious. When I woke the next morning he said it was my fault, and if I hadn't been late and upset him, he wouldn't have hurt me."

Logan growled. "It wasn't yer fault, Sare. Never was. He was tryin' ta make ya feel like it was ta excuse his own behavior."

She nodded. "I know that now, but at the time I believed him. So I tried harder to be the perfect wife, but no matter what I did he still got mad, and he still hurt me. In bed, he became rougher, more brutal, and he hurt me terribly. I complained, and he beat me." She swallowed. "So I stopped complaining. About everything. I tried to tell my dad, but he didn't want to hear it. He was too busy being proud of his rank and being the Senator's father-in-law to care about how I felt. Then one night when I came home I found both of them in the den talking about Meredith Pharmaceuticals. I didn't mean to eavesdrop, I was hanging up my coat when I heard my name mentioned, and I stopped to listen. I was furious. I marched in there and demanded to know what they were talking about. Richard got upset. Told me it wasn't my business. When I wouldn't let it go he threw me across his desk, tied me down, and hit me, over and over, with the fireplace poker. He broke both of my legs and three of my ribs before I managed to placate him with my screams and begging. Then, to keep the house staff from finding out, he locked me in the small room you saw in his bedroom. My dad sat there and watched, Logan. He watched all of it, and never said a word." 

There were tears in her eyes. "I remember begging him to make Richard stop, begging him to do something, but he just sat there and drank his scotch and stared into the fire. I think the betrayal hurt as much as the beating did. When Richard dragged me off to his room I was still screaming at my father, cursing him for not caring about me. I've never spoken to him since then."

She took a deep breath, and went on. "One night when he was hitting me, he dropped his shields and I saw what was in his mind. He was a sadist. He enjoyed hurting me. He enjoyed hearing me scream. I was scared. I tried to leave, I spent the night at a friend's house. But he found me, dragged me home. He locked me up and tortured me for two weeks. In that time he broke every bone in my body at least once. If it hadn't been for our butler I would have died. He would sneak into the room when Richard went to work and give me food and water, but he didn't dare do anything else. Richard was too powerful.

"So I gave him what he wanted. I obeyed him, became his slave, literally, because I was terrified of being put back in that room. And when he set up those weekly poker games with some of his closest friends, people he knew wouldn't tell anyone about his sadistic tendencies because they were the same, I went along with it. I resisted the first time he ordered me to serve as the 'prize', and he hurt me, and I never said 'no' to him again. That club introduced him to the use of whips and electricity as torture devices, and he got the whips and the car battery to use on me. You saw them."

Logan's hands were clenched in his lap, trying to suppress the boiling anger that washed his mind with red. That Ryan could do this to Sara! He couldn't imagine anyone doing such things to someone they had married. The sheer brutality of it appalled him. He forced himself to listen to the rest of Sara's narrative.

"Then one evening he brought one of his poker friends home and showed him the setup he had. The spent the whole night coming up with different ways to hurt me and I couldn't walk for a week because of what they'd done. That was when I knew I had to leave. He would kill me if I didn't. I talked a friend at the hospital into lending me money, and one morning I left for the hospital and never came home. I hid in my apartment, and began trying to find a lawyer to handle my divorce. I finally found one, or thought I had, several months later, and just got up enough courage to resume my work at the hospital. He harassed me, stopped me at work, tried to get me to come home, but my boss at the hospital had an idea of why I was hiding from him, and told me not to go back. If it hadn't been for her I might have gone back, I was so terrified of him. But the longer I stayed away from him the better I felt. It had been three years since I left when I ran into you and the others, and the rest you know."

She looked at Logan, tears on her face now. "I told myself I'd never get into a physical relationship with anyone else. I told myself I was better off by myself. Then I met you. You taught me what real love was, how wonderful it could be if there was love in a relationship. I love you, Logan."


	11. Chapter 11

Chapter 11

"You look great!" was Jean's exclamation as she greeted Sara on their return. Logan had gone directly up to speak to Charles, and Sara had gone to drop their things in their downstairs room and get her things unpacked.

Sara studied herself in the mirror. The time spent at the cabin had brought back her muscle tone, and sparring with Logan in the meadow behind the house had sharpened her fighting skills. She was whole, now, the limp gone, and she felt much better than she had when she'd left.

Logan had insisted she tell him everything. And though she hated to see the expression on his face when she told him some of the worst things that had happened to her, it had helped to not have to carry such terrible things around in her head anymore. Having someone to help her share the burden of her memories helped her find a measure of peace.

"I feel better," she admitted to Jean as she dumped the dirty clothes into the hamper. "Uh, Jean… before I left, the nightmares… I'm sorry you saw some of that."

Jean hugged her. "I'm sorry you had to suffer through that."

Sara hugged her back. "I have to talk to Charles. Is he in his study?"

"Yeah. I think Logan's in there, too."

Sara went off to find him.

Upstairs Logan told Charles everything that had happened. He gave him a bare-bones sketch of some of the things she had told him, concluding with, "Sara said her father had forged her signature on her prenuptial agreement giving Ryan control of her company."

"Is there a way to break that agreement?" Sara asked as she came in, holding a sheaf of papers in her hand. Xavier put on his reading glasses and perused the document she handed to him. "I decided that if it's mine I should have it. He's lost his Senate seat, his career, and his respectability. I lost a lot more. I'm going to try to get everything that's mine back. I want to hurt him like he's hurt me, and the best way to do that is through his pocket." She sat back and waited as Xavier read the agreement.

Xavier struggled to keep his face impassive as he read the document. Sara's father had wanted his promotion so badly he had literally sold his daughter for it. According to the agreement, if anything ever happened to Sara, Ryan would get everything. If they ever divorced, Ryan would get everything. And Charles had heard of Meredith Pharmaceuticals; he owned stock in the company. It was quite a large one, though its stock had dropped over the last six years or so; he knew why now. 

The signature on the end of the document was patently false. The hand that wrote it was supposed to look like her handwriting, but it lacked the artistic, elegant flourish that made Sara's handwriting so unique. "Yes," he said finally, removing his glasses, "I don't think there will be a problem breaking it. Sara, have you any idea what you'll do with Meredith when you get it back?"

She looked taken aback. "No," she confessed, looking slightly sheepish. "I hadn't thought about it yet, I figure I'll find out what kind of state Richard's left it in before I do anything else."

"Mmmm. Let me see what my lawyers can do. This won't be easy; I expect your ex-husband will fight this as much as possible. However, let me see what I can find out for you while we do that. I can tell you that it is quite large, and up to about six years ago, quite successful. From what Logan told me, I assume things began to go downhill after your mother died. The Senator was not so much concerned about how much money it made as he was about how much he could drain from it. At present it is down to four international offices rather than the ten it had before your mother passed away. Several lucrative contracts were turned down in favor of smaller ones that did not work out, and two of those contracts have been canceled in the last year and a half."

"International offices?" Sara's voice cracked. "I had no idea…how do you know all this?"

"I own stock in the company," Charles said, eyes twinkling a bit. "And Dr. MacTaggert, the head of Muir Island Research Center, has been attempting to buy your company, or at least secure a contract with it, for some time now."

Sara blinked. "Oh, wow. Please, see what your attorneys can do, and let me know what you can find out about Meredith. I'd really appreciate it, Charles."

"I shall do so. In the meantime," he smiled at her, "Welcome home. I am glad to see you back."

She grinned, a sunny smile that lit up her face, "It's good to be home. I didn't realize how much I missed it here." She giggled. "As nice as Warren's 'rustic cabin' is, it's not home."

Xavier chuckled. "He does have a somewhat different idea what constitutes 'rustic,' doesn't he? The first time he mentioned it, I was imagining a log cabin on a mountainside somewhere. Imagine my shock when he showed me a picture of the place!" They laughed.

Xavier picked up his glasses and reached for his Rolodex. "Let me call my attorney and see what we can do about having the agreement annulled. Meanwhile, I'm sure the flight was long, and you'd like to get unpacked and settled in. And the others have a present for you they're probably itching for you to see." He refused to say anything further, instead waving them out of his office as he picked up the telephone.

"Logan! Sara!" Gambit hailed them as they passed him in the hall. He was wearing an ear-to-ear grin, greasy jeans, and very little else, Sara noticed with a blush. "'S good to see you bot' back. Logan, come down to de garage, we got somet'in we want your opinion on. Sara, not yet, you hafta wait. I t'ink de girls are making lunch in de kitchen. We oughtta be done in a half hour, cherie, t'en you come see, eh?" He hustled Logan off, and Sara went with some bemusement to the kitchen to find preparations for lunch well under way. "What's Gambit being all mysterious about?" she asked Rogue as she joined her at the sink slicing fresh vegetables for a salad.

Rogue glanced at Jean, Betsy, and Storm, and they giggled all at once, which confirmed to Sara that they were in on the surprise too. "Ah, just gettin' up a s'prise for ya, sugah," Rogue said, looking like the cat that ate the canary. Jean and Storm had identical expressions. Betsy was trying to keep a straight face, but her lips kept trying to twitch in a smile. Sara pounced on her. 

"What is it? Betts, come on!" She tickled Betsy in the ribs. "Tell!"

"I can't," Betsy howled with laughter and tried to fend her attacker off with a carrot. "Warren swore me to secrecy!"

Sara leaned back against the sink and pouted, which sent all of the women off into laughter again. "Oh, Sara," Rogue gasped, holding her sides, "You should see your face! Na, ya just hafta wait!"

Logan stood in the garage door, his eyes full of the sight of Sara's surprise. "Wow," was all he could manage.

Scott slid out from under the front, sweaty but triumphant. "We were hoping you wouldn't bring her back until we finished," he said, eyes twinkling. "I kind of wanted to take her out for a test drive, but I guess Sara will have to do that. I just hope she lets me borrow the keys sometime!"

Logan shook his head. "Yer gonna have ta stand in line," he said, walking around, drinking in the details. "What, didja guys get new panels fer it?"

"Yep," Bobby put down the polishing cloth he was using on the trunk lid. "Practically new everything. The old stuff was too badly rusted. We rebuilt her engine, got a new transmission and carburetor, and repainted it. Sara still had the original tags for her, too, and we had them reregistered. So she's got a genuine fully restored historic piece here--" He was interrupted by a clattering outside the door. Sara pulled it open, and froze.

Her 71 Chevelle sat gleaming in the garage lights, her bright red paint polished to a high shine, fully restored and looking beautiful. Sara swallowed several times hard, before she found her voice. "Guys, she's gorgeous. My god, how did you find time for all of this…wow." She ran a hand lightly over the hood. "I don't know how to thank you for this. Wow." She stood for a moment. "Candy Apple Red, huh?" 

"Yeah," Scott looked uncertain. "We couldn't find Shadow Blue in the store, and Storm said you were due back today, so we settled for Red. We can order it at the parts store and repaint it when the paint comes in if you want."

"Oh, no…no, this is fine, this is wonderful…wow… jeez, I can't stop saying that…"

Scott dropped the keys into her hand. "Here. Go ahead and take her out for a spin. Just remember, I want to borrow the keys sometime!"

She hugged him so hard he thought his ribs were going to crack. "You got it, Scott," she whispered. "Logan, care to come along?"

"Wouldn't miss it, darlin'!" he hopped into the front passenger seat, and she slid into the drivers' seat as the guys opened the garage door. They were off in a squeal of tires, and Scott winced. "Take care of her!" he yelled at the taillights.

It wasn't as hard as Xavier thought it would be. The judge took a look at the signature on the form, saw the signature on Sara's license, and annulled it on the spot. 

It didn't take long for the president of the company to learn about the change in hands. Xavier arranged for a business dinner between him and Sara at an upscale restaurant downtown, and Sara dressed carefully for it. She was glad she had when she met him; he was a grizzled middle-aged man with a lot of experience in the company, and the first thing she found out about him was that he thought she would fire him.

"Why would I do that?" she asked in puzzlement. "I don't know anything about Meredith. I need someone fairly high up who I can trust who knows how to handle this." She sipped at her soda as he contemplated this. "Look, Mr. Harmon, my mother left me this company. My husband took it when we got married; believe it or not, I didn't know this company belonged to me until after it was taken from me. I've gotten it back now through a stroke of luck," She decided not to go into details. "I don't know the first thing about what it requires to handle a company. I actually don't even know a whole lot about the company period. Why don't you tell me what has been going on, and I'll try to follow along." She smiled charmingly at him, and he launched into a detailed analysis of the company and its movements over the last six years.

She listened as he talked, and found out what her ex-husband had been doing with her company while she was unaware. And she was horrified. 

Meredith Pharmaceuticals was, six years ago, one of the biggest sales-and-research drug corporations in the world. They developed, tested, marketed, and sold drugs for everything she could think of, from basic aspirin to anthrax vaccines. At the time of Catherine Meredith's death, they had branches in Tokyo, Moscow, Paris, London, Berlin, Rome, Beijing, Los Angeles, New York, and Washington D.C. Sara's eyes bugged a bit at the thought of all that, and frowned as Mark Harmon went on. The year after her mother died, Richard Ryan had closed and liquidated the Los Angeles and Berlin branches, and now she knew where the campaign money had come from for his Senate push. The next four years had seen the closure of the Rome, Paris, and Beijing branches, and last year Tokyo closed, too. 

Part of it was that Richard had been spending huge amounts of money to keep himself in the senate seat, the other problem was that he had been trying to curry favor with those in power. He had told Mr. Harmon to turn down lucrative contracts with several major health systems and governments to sign smaller, unimportant contracts with his private friends. Two of those contracts had been reneged on, and the resulting profit loss for the company, amounting to some three billion U.S. dollars, had crippled it so that the closure of the Tokyo branch, one of the most profitable in Meredith, had been a necessity. Sara was appalled that Richard had been that careless.

"We got an offer from a Scottish company six months ago," Mark Harmon said, "Muir Island Research. They're a very well known, established facility," and Sara nodded, having heard that much from Xavier, "and they're offering us a way out of the hole. A contract to share resources and information in an effort to combat this Legacy Virus everyone's worried about. It will pay us nearly four million by the end of this year and eight million each succeeding year until we find a cure or vaccine. When I contacted your husband about it, I strongly recommended that he allow us to sign the contract; it would allow us to keep in business. He seemed quite careless about the entire thing, and told us not to sign with them." 

He stirred the ice around in his glass. "Unbeknownst to him, I had been talking to the head of Muir Island about buying the company outright. We're close to the red, and the best I could think of was to sell the company after declaring bankruptcy." He looked at her. "I'll be honest with you, Mrs. Ryan, if I were in your position I'd do it. Trying to get the company back on its feet is going to require a great deal of time and attention, and there's no guarantee that it's doable. We've just lost too much money and have exhausted too much of our funds. Our stock is down. What do you want to do?"

Sara thought about all the possibilities. "I'm not ready to call it quits yet, Mr. Harmon. As long as there's a chance, I'll take it. Please arrange a meeting between Muir Island and us, and draw up the appropriate paperwork for the contract. The contract, Mr. Harmon, not the sellout. I hate to think about all our people suddenly finding themselves jobless, with the economy the way it is."

He looked at her. "Are you sure you want to do this, Mrs. Ryan? It will require a great deal of time and expense, and there are no guarantees."

She held up a hand. "Yes, Mr. Harmon, I do, and please call me Sara. Sara Michaels. I'm getting a divorce from the good Senator Ryan, and the sooner the better."

"Your husband is Senator Ryan?" Something about the way he spoke made her look up from where she was digging in her purse for her wallet.

"Yes."

He reached for her hand across the table, not quite touching it, in a gesture of support, and he caught her eye with a sympathetic smile. "I read about the divorce in the papers. I'm very sorry, Sara, I didn't know he was the one I was speaking to all this time."

She gave him a small smile. "The sooner he and I separate the better off we all will be," she said, waving for the waitress to bring their check. "So I shall see you…soon, I hope." She scribbled her cell phone number on a card, then Xavier's mansion's number under that. "Please call my cell number first, but if it's urgent and I happen not to have it with me, call the number below it. It's Professor Charles Xavier's number. Someone will answer it, and I'll get the message."

"Charles Xavier?" Here was another surprise, Harmon thought.

"Yes, do you know him?" Sara wrote a check for the amount on the slip of paper and dug a ten out of her wallet for the tip.

"Not personally, no, but he's part owner of the company that owns Muir Island Research," Harmon said.

Sara chuckled as she stood. "Well, let's see if I can talk to him. In the meantime, please arrange the meeting, Mr. Harmon." She collected her purse as he stood too.

"Call me Mark, please. And it was a definite pleasure to meet you, Mrs. Ry—uh, Ms. Michaels." He shook her hand and left.

"You didn't tell me you owned part of Muir Island Research," Sara said accusingly to Charles as she poked her head into his study.

She entered at his invitation and gave him a detailed description of the evening. Charles sat soberly while she talked, and was silent for a while as she finished.

"Sara, are you sure you want to do this?" he said. She nodded. "You've got a lot going on, Sara. The X-Men alone would be a full-time job for anyone, much less working at the hospital and trying to manage a corporation all at the same time." He leaned forward, clasping his hands on the desktop. "I would have suggested that you take Mr. Harmon's advice. It will take a lot of time to accomplish what you want, to get Meredith up and running again. You're going to have to take an extended trip overseas, to see what can be done about the branches there. And do you really want to spend that much time away from Logan?"

It was something Sara hadn't thought about. "I didn't think about that, Charles. I think I should talk to him before I decide anything else."

Logan was watching TV in their room as she entered, dropped her purse on her desk chair, and pulled her high heels off. Logan pulled her foot into his lap and rubbed her aching toes as she sank back onto the bed with a sigh. "I don't know why you women wear these things," he said mildly. When she didn't reply he took a closer look at her. "What's wrong, darlin'?"

It came out in a rush. Logan sat there and let her talk herself out, noting the intensity on her face and the animation in her body language. She wanted to go, but she would give it all up to stay with him, if that was what he wanted. Part of him wanted to tell her to stay, to never leave him, but another, wiser part of him knew that this was important to her, and that it would also help her find herself. She was dependent on him, as she had been dependent on her husband, and it wasn't right.

"Sara," he hugged her. "Go."

She seemed about to say something else, so he placed a finger over her lips and said quietly, "Go. It's important to you, and I can see that. I will still be here waiting for you when you get back, Sara. We'll all still be here. This is home for you." He kissed her.

She snuggled against him. "Are you sure?"

"Yes," he said firmly.


End file.
